The site has a bunch of videos now, of varying levels of production quality, ranting or raving about Crocs. It’s an unusual idea for a company, to give hate the same billing as love. But it makes sense.

There are a lot of places for people to spew hate on the Internet, so why not try and corral it when you can?

And for newspapers, it’s even more useful. We are — and we should be — polarizing. People will be angry about our editorials and have opinions about our stories. Why not give them a place to talk? It would be useful to find out what people are thinking and what we might need to change.

There will inevitably be the usual trolling: OMG yr paper is teh sux0rz! Die plz. Kthxbai

The Crocs site doesn’t have to deal with that as much, because they set a relatively high bar to entry. But we can igore the useless comments and work on fixing the problems we find. It helps to follow Chip Scanlan’s advice to Be a sponge, be a duck.

So are any papers out there giving people a place to talk specifically about the issues they have with the paper?

The points made are pretty valid: commenters are often rude, off-topic or both. Newspapers would never publish much of what’s said in comments on their editorial pages, and people are allowed to hide behind pseudonyms.

The writer makes the argument that newspapers should be in the news business and blogs should be in the business of trafficking in comments. But that misses the point. Comments, no matter how nasty, are a useful addition to newspaper stories.

Comments are not a conversation. That doesn’t mean they’re useless, though. There are lots of ways to have conversations on the Internet, and newspapers are looking to add more all the time. But the gut-level reaction that stories provoke is worth giving its own forum.

Take our recent live coverage of Barack Obama’s visit to Cedar Rapids.

One person wants to know why we’re bothering, when people could just read about the visit in the next day’s paper. I’ll leave you to absorb the irony of making such a comment on a Web site.

Others spend a lot of time arguing about Obama’s merits,  in sometimes crude terms. But they’d be doing that anyway. We’re just letting those comments take place out in the open.

That’s part of the new mission of the media. We’re not just telling people what’s happening anymore, we need to listen to what they have to say, as well.

We need to do more to foster real conversations and to make sure the trolls don’t take over. But that doesn’t mean we should stop letting people comment on our stories.

He likes it a lot, but others are at best indifferent. I fall firmly in the second camp, and I’ve helped to start a webcast for a newspaper once. More than a year ago, this was the Next Big Thing. Places like the Roanoke Times led the curve with them, and won all kinds of awards.

But, as mentioned in the comments, the Times’ webcast is dead. It didn’t get traction with viewers or advertisers, only getting a few hundred hits per episode. Maybe the paper isn’t big enough, with a circulation of about 100,000.

Or maybe there’s a bigger issue: Webcasts don’t work for newspapers.

It doesn’t matter if they’re well-produced or just ape TV news, it’s the wrong format. Daily casts like rocketboom.com worked (when they did) because they had a fresh, funny take on the news delivered by a recognizable personality.

But this post about the death of Roanoke’s webcast also brings up a good point: people don’t go on the Web to have stories bundled together, they go online to pick out interesting stories.

That’s where video shines: one-topic, short videos. If you’re good and can build an audience, that will drive much more traffic than a Webcast ever will.

The name came from Gazette editor Steve Buttry, and is a pretty good description. I’ll be helping move the paper toward becoming more interactive.

The idea is that we need to implement features to get our readers more involved. It’s not the only tool in the tool box, but giving people a place to come together is a way we can start to help foster community.

I’ll be blogging about what we’re trying, what works and what doesn’t, and the long road toward our vision. Should be a fun ride.

We worry about leaking our enterprise stories too early, we don’t always follow stories with consistent updates, and, let’s face it, there are a lot of newspaper sites that are hard, if not impossible to navigate.

And the points he makes are valid. Changing the link structure is a great way to make sure no one sees a story again, and making readers login is a great way to make sure no one sees a story in the first place. Online analytics have come far enough that you don’t need to have a list of registered users, you can find out how many people are actually reading and go from there.

But the best point he has is one we should have gotten a long time ago: we need to stick with what we know best. A Web site isn’t like a newspaper, and the idea of a monolithic information provider is dead. So why do so many papers keep bombarding readers with wire copy they can get elsewhere. That space could be better used to showcase more of our local expertise, and to get good stories in front of more eyes.

We’re going in honor of my grandfather, who died last June. You can follow our trip at http://www.thekellysgotoireland.com

We’ll be updating with photos, video and text as often as we can get Internet access.

She’s dead on. You’ll never catch me argue for fewer toys for the newsroom, but we need to start doing the things we’d like to, however we can, and prove that it’s worthwhile before starting to throw money at it. The name of the game is audience building, and that means trying new things, particularly low-risk things, to try and capture new eyes. If it’s more successful, we can develop it.

Or maybe we don’t need to. At my last paper, we started shooting video and bought a Canon GL2 and started to shoot video. We had a nice set of wireless mics, a decent shotgun mic, a mini news-gathering setup. Very high-quality video.

No one used it unless I made them. It was too much.

Then we bought the Pure Digital Flip for $100. This little camera is stupidly simple to use. It has a big red button on the back, and that’s it. I call it reporter proof. It also produces better video and sound than a camera that cheap has a right to. Reporters loved to take it out, and our use of video went way up.

People in the media talk about “just good enough,” but it’s also really misunderstood. That doesn’t mean making crappy content. It means not getting hung up in perfecting things and actually getting content out the door. If that means a cellphone camera or the Flip Video, what’s wrong with that?

How many other people would match that description, let alone a yet more specific one? Not many, to be sure. But I don’t want to find my exact match, I want to find people who are interested in some of the same things I am. Newspapers need to find a way to offer their readers a way to connect with readers with other people with some of the same interests. Social networks like Facebook and MySpace are great. They give people a way to connect.

But people are interested in news stories, too, and if a newspaper could give them a forum to read the stories they want to and then discuss them with like-minded people, they would be able to really build a community on their Web sites.

Here’s the problem as I see it. Companies are letting you store information that they’re giving you — information you could get anyway — and telling you it’s yours. No, it isn’t. It’s yours if you had a hand in creating it, or some vested stake in it, or some part in the conversation.

In some cases you do have that. MyStarbucks Idea is a place for consumers to kvetch or just make suggestions. And you can immerse yourself in a “subtly branded experience” on myCoke.

But in a lot of cases, it’s still about the company addressing you, and maybe you getting to make a comment or two. Just because you use the prefix “my” doesn’t mean you care about consumers, just like using the prefix “i” doesn’t mean you put the care into your product that Apple does.

It helps as a signifier, sure, but it also smacks of opportunism (a point noted in the NYT article). And face facts, the kids are moving away from MySpace. It’s still popular, sure, but if we’re really trying to reach the younger demographic, we need to appeal to them, not appeal to what they used to like.

Tom Altman (and others) keep saying that the ideal is to give people a place to have a conversation. Some people have coined the term “wedia” and I like that, although it’s not very euphonious. How about “our”? Our___ could have a nice ring to it.

But rather than picking out a prefix of any kind, how about actually giving users a place to have a conversation, to contribute and to get the content they want?