Stories and how to make it useful

Back in the day, Digg.com was one of the hottest websites in the world, acting as an aggregated link farm for all blogs and news outlets in the world. It ultimately failed because it became too bloated and because large groups started to mass vote to get higher rankings. When planning Stories, these are things to consider and to design around so I don't repeat these mistakes. Instead, I need to focus on what made Digg something valuable to the users.

The first advantage is that Stories is focused on a fairly limited number of topics, where the Atlassian ecosystem is the main focus. While the Interesting and Ways of Working categories are fairly broad areas, they are still limited to a reasonably niched community. I also do not expect to go viral anytime soon, so the volume should be manageable. If things escalated, then we can always split the database into several areas....which I might do anyway now that I think about it...

Functionality wise, I will try to keep things as easy as possible and expand only if I see that it actually lead to more value. The main focus will of course be to make sure the users quickly can get to the website to read the full article. The secondary function is to rate the Stories to help them become more visible, and the third is to provide a discussion area for the story for those that want to comment or discuss the story.

I think that once I have some traffic it might make sense to split up to have more than one sorting on the start page, but in the beginning I will just have the latest Stories. I will also have the latest Stories block for the sidebar, and then I can add blocks for top ranked over time and make that a tabbed block.

For now my main focus is to update the categories for the Atlassian categories, since they are the main focus, and then I will consider if I want to split the Stories for the other main focus areas, or keep them in one database.

Stories will be a fun thing to build, I think, and I will look at how I can combine this with the Release notes as well...