Comments on: MNSpeak > Secrets of the City Transition

By: Matt Bartel

Matt Bartel — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 23:43:14 +0000

You have a few good points, Ed.

Here’s what we’re working on:
- Bringing back email subscriptions of comment threads. (We just started working on it today after we saw your post, so it might be a few days.)
- Linking to users’ URLs in addition to their profiles. In fact, we might eventually go a step further with CommentLuv (http://drupal.org/project/commentluv). It automatically pulls the last post from your RSS feed and links to it.
- Bring back post/comment archive

Your point about increased use of RSS readers is probably accurate. The best thing we can do to maintain our usefulness is to offer more context within our posts. Instead of just linking to an article and offering a brief quote, we need to do a better job of adding links from related sources so that posts give readers a better sense of what the local interwebs are saying about a topic.

As for the name/design change… keep in mind that we had a big Rake constituency to think about, too (twice as big as MNSpeak’s, in fact).

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Ads Be Gone | Conner's Blog — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 22:24:05 +0000

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By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:49:22 +0000

Another thought about the horrible “Secrets of the City name”– what city? What kind of secrets?
It’s so generic. There’s nothing to connect it to minneapolis, st paul or even a city in Minnesota. And, do they mean Minneapolis or ST Paul? Which city? No one on the cool side of the river considers themselves part of that other city. and only suburbanites say Twin Cities so, no, “Secrets of the Cities” won’t work either.

I , as you can tell, hate the name. It ranks up there with the Minnesota Wild. The wild what?

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 15:42:55 +0000

It’s the name. “MNSPeak” is a good name. “Secrets of the City” is just awful as a name. And it doesn’t speak to what they do. It’s not a secrets website. It was an aggregation website with interesting stories about minnesota and the sad, sad stories of an ever drunker Wisconsin.
I know I go there much less just because everytime I see “Secrets of the City” I think “What kind of aspirational garbage is this?”

By: Sornie

Sornie — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 14:36:11 +0000

I agree with the point about profile pages vs. website/blog links of commenters on SOtC. I am not leaning heavily towards loving or hating SOtC but any change takes time to get used to. With a few tweaks, SOtC could build the former Rake Mag’s readership because once on a website, at least a few readers will click around. It sucks to see the MNSpeak brand gone but as far as a business decision it will likely make sense.