Opening up the Salon
I’ve always been a big fan of Salon.com, though I’ve never been a huge participant in its community (such as The Well). I’ve simply enjoyed its consistently strong writing and opinion pieces. Along with Slate, it’s in the highest tier of web magazine publications. During the dark days between the web 1.0 bust up and web 2.0 glory, Salon kind of represented a scrappy outpost of verve, credibility, and style in the online space.
Well, Salon doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon, and in fact is launching a rather intriguing and not-so-little social media experiment called Open Salon. The basic idea is that Salon is using its brand and “built-in audience” to open up a free and hosted blog network that includes promotion (both on Open Salon’s front page, and even more interestingly, Salon.com’s high profile front page), content voting (something close to Digg-style, we would assume), and a “peer-to-peer payment system” called Tippem.
Mathew Ingram sums up best as he most often does in stating: “Salon has certainly put together some or all of the pieces of a new-media strategy: blogging, a Digg-style rating feature, featured content promoted on the main site, and a micro-payment system. Even if it doesn’t work, it should produce some interesting lessons.”
The Open Salon front page, as you can see from the image above, is well… scrappy comes to mind once again, but I’m sure they’ll be tweaking and tuning over time. Profile pages, which are essentially showcases for blogging, are much more attractive (check out Michael Copperman’s by way of example).
I suspect that Open Salon will attract a similar community as Vox (mid-’20s and older, upwardly mobile, webby but not hyperconnected geek) but will have the opportunity to tap into a broader swath of potential bloggers via Salon.com’s reach.
Caroline McCarthy at CNET’s The Social thinks that the micropayments “tip” draw to Open Salon will prove popular as long as a complimentary $10 comes with sign-up but will be “less certain” after that promotion ends.
Without doubt the popularity of Digg, Facebook, Twitter, and Friendfeed shows that there is a market for some kind of convergence of blogging, social networking, and “social news/media”-style community features. I’ll be curious to see how Open Salon fares as it experiments with a truly social and promotion-friendly blogging community.
