While I was crossing the street (Connecticut Avenue in Kensington, Maryland: 6 lane divided highway) this evening, I thought to myself: why isn’t my weblog moderated? [context is important here]
I link to a lot of stuff. I write some personal stuff, and then every once in awhile I write something quite worth reading. Why can’t someone view my weblog at a Slashdot threshold of 4, 3, 2, 1, 0, or -1 depending on what they’re looking for. If they viewed my weblog at 3, they’d catch some of my better work, probably the stuff that gets me flow from various sources. I would probably set the default for my weblog to 1, that way the stuff that doesn’t matter would get modded down, but everything else would be 1 or above.
The stuff deemed useless by my readers would be modded -1 Redunant, Unfunny, Dross or something of the sort. Users who found a particular post helpful would rank it +1 Insightful, Interesting, Amusing, Funny, Productive, Useful, etc. It could be done on a per-post basis or someone could moderate several posts at once on the main page.
Now here’s the kicker for everyone who complains about weblogs always being in reverse-chronological order: There’s a little menu on the sidebar that allows you to view posts by date (chronological or reverse chronological) OR by rank (highest moderated weblog posts first). This way someone can come to my weblog and view my stuff staring at the most intelligent things I’ve said.
I can see this easier to implement (in theory) with a dynamic weblog (like Roller) but I’m sure Sam could hack this up in about 6 lines of Perl (I’m being generous) and the obligatory new template.
Moderators: Please mod this post up.