Zachary M. Seward explains Gawkers unruly new twist on traditional reader forums:
Readers are now greeted with a text box as large as the blog’s logo, inviting them to share news, videos, links, and trivialities. Tagging a message with #tips on Gawker, for instance, automatically sends it to the “tips” tag page, where anyone can follow the stream of submissions and Gawker writers will keep an eye out for news to promote on the front page. Same for #mac on Gizmodo, #snapjudgment on Jezebel, #DUAN on Deadspin, or any other tag. (If DUAN means nothing to you, then welcome to the impassioned world of loyal blog commenters. It’s short for Deadspin Up All Night.)
Gawker Open Forums is the name of this potentially wild mix of reader-controlled news and commentary. “I’m expecting chaos,” Nick Denton, the publisher of Gawker Media, told me on Gchat late yesterday. “But as the front pages of our sites become ever more professional, it’s even more important to allow anarchy to bubble up from below. The goal is to blur the line between our editors and commenter-contributors.”