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Comments

I wrote a brief post about our launch on my personal blog today, focusing mostly on the extent to which we kept things simple when planning the new website. On reflection I’m not sure that “simple” is the right word.

Reviewing the responses submitted on our first Daily Q&A, what stands out is the thought and intelligence that each and every one of our readers has put into their answers. Being the stats. junkie that I am, I pasted all the comments into Word (yes, I’m a mac guy, but yes Danielle was right, Word is better than Pages or NeoOffice or any of the other nonsense I’ve brought with me into the office) just so I could see exactly how much people had written. More than 5,000 words, all of them profound, deeply moving and sincere.

So “simple” clearly isn’t the right word, but the point I was trying to make was that what we’re trying to do here is not to impose a top-down set of ideas on our community. Rather our hope is for this website to provide some structure, a sounding board for and a place for reflection upon the ideas our community already has.

So the feedback that means the most to us isn’t praise because we say things that are witty or smart or meaningful (though we hope to be all of these things). Instead, as we expand this website, we’d like to know whether we’re succeeding in creating a space in which you feel inspired to tell your own stories. Simple, really.