Mike Pence wonders why Salon doesn’t couple user/reader comment/feedback more closely to our articles:

Don’t miss the user’s comments — they add so much to the value of the content of online magazines like K5. The loose coupling between Table Talk and Salon causes Salon to be missing this entire dimension of content — user comments linked directly to a story, including the ability of other users to rate the comments of their peers.

Answering Mike involves a little bit of a detour through Salon’s history, but I think it’s worth it, so here goes.

When we started Salon we thought Table Talk would be the place where visitors to our site would go to comment on our articles. We envisioned links at the end of every article pointing to discussions in TT, and we included them for some time. But we quickly learned several things: The people in TT were mostly not that interested in talking about Salon articles; they were extremely interested in talking, but wanted to talk about what they wanted to talk about.

At the same time, we discovered that our readers were inundating us with literally hundreds of e-mails every day responding to the articles we ran. (This was true even before we included the “send us a letter to the editor” link at the end of most articles.)

We chose — I think wisely — not to try to push the river: We let TT evolve in the direction its users were taking it, and since the readers of Salon articles were deciding to use e-mail to respond, we started running their responses on letters-to-the-editor pages.

When we started Salon in 1995 there was no Slashdot or Slashcode and the availability of any kind of software for organizing user interactivity was extremely limited, particularly on the platform we then used (Mac servers!). In the intervening years this realm has of course exploded with cool innovations. Meanwhile, Table Talk has gone through its own evolution, most recently becoming a pay-to-post forum — a move we had to undertake for financial reasons (advertising support for such user forums has largely evaporated since the popping of the Web-industry bubble). And our flow of letters-to-the-editor remains huge.

To return to Mike’s point, we’re still interested in finding better ways to yoke the user-response to the original content. But we can’t simply move Salon onto an existing platform like Slashcode or any of the similar software packages out there, for all sorts of reasons. (We’d have to rebuild our existing content management system, ad serving software, and so on.) So we have an ongoing project here to move our existing letters-to-the-editor model onto one that is more user-directed — there’d be a script-generated letters page corresponding to each article, and users could post their responses themselves. (Other sites do this without calling it “letters”; I think we just like that label’s heritage, its connection with the old print world that Salon grew out of.)

Nothing revolutionary here, for sure — this is something lots of sites do. We’d be catching up. In any case, this plan is on the drawing board, waiting its turn while our stalwart production team deals with other, more immediately pressing projects. My hunch is we’ll have it in place sometime this winter or at latest next spring.