And I see my lacrosse story idea didn’t quite make it to the vote….what gives???????? preferential reporting on a newsVOTE site???????

You make a really good point about the pet projects. I’d prefer knowing that if a reader stumbles upon something interesting, they’d think to post it to the blog. No way to measure that yet.

We’ll definitely be promoting it in print. Each story that comes out of this effort will be accompanied by the blog’s URL, a brief description, and credit to the person who pitched it.

As for the dropoff in numbers after the initial post, here’s my completely unscientific guess: Perhaps some of those responses came from people who saw the initial post as a venue for telling you the pet story they’ve been harping for the paper to cover. I certainly seemed to pick up that tone from a few of the comments. Perhaps those people are more interested in telling you their pet story than being consistent participants in this venture. So maybe the responses you got on the follow-up post should be the starting benchmark from which to measure the growth of your project, since those are the people who might be willing to participate on a consistent basis even if their pet stories aren’t in the poll.

I think you definitely need a lot of promotion for something like this. You mentioned you did a lot of social media promotion. What about promotion in print to reach audience segments that might not be heavily involved in social media? They might have stories to tell, and commenting & voting on a blog doesn’t demand all that much social media immersion. I also hope you’re planning to put a promo in print and online w/ every story you write from this experiment. Even in the example you gave about the story you got from a reader about what to tell someone who’s been laid off, you can stick a promo w/ it that says something like “This story idea came from a reader. Tell us and the community your untold story now at …”

Don’t be discouraged by low poll counts early on. As you point out, you really need your effort promoted on the front page of the paper’s Web site.

And, I’ve found, that things like these take time to grow. (Not that I’ve done anything of this magnitude. But I do this “reader’s question” thing in my weekly column. Readers e-mail me a question; I post it on my blog and in my column; other readers answer it. At first, no questions/no answers … then, people sort of got what we were trying to do. Some weeks I’m flooded.)

Another point: Even if people don’t vote on a story … could be a good idea. Readers don’t have to follow the format to express their idea. (Don’t fall into the old media trap of — people must do things the way we want them to.)

Good luck!

That “two mile rule” for busing seems a little hard to believe.

tap-tap no takebacks!

hehe… okay. So it is a silly argument to have - but either way what you are doing is very refreshing. Admitting that people should have a say in editorial output! Ludicrous!

If I win the lottery - I would just hand that money to the users on spot.us - and they could essentially “vote” on what stories they want to see.

In my opinion every news org should have a Daniel Victor doing what you are doing.