Building Something Good

Yahoo launched a new TV site and then got repeatedly bashed in the comments by users. I was surprised to see the normally snarky Techcrunch comment on how this is a good thing for Yahoo. The idea being that Yahoo is soliciting feedback and acting on it.

It reminded me of my own recent woes trying to figure out a useful way to translate an email message into a blog post or comment. The problem was that what may be useful in an email message (quoting every message in the thread, signatures, etc) are mostly noise once you structure them in a web site. Recent events have reminded me of the importance of feedback. I’ve started trying to think of a way to collect feedback inside the web app as to what’s noise and what’s signal in a posting.

I also noticed that others have problems gatewaying HTML emails out of mailing lists as well.