Sometimes Dave Winer's thought process is hard to follow.  When I asked him what he'd teach journalists in a 10-month program like UNR's Master's in Interactive Journalism, he said to drop Drupal and focus on blogging.  I responded with a few reasons why I thought teaching students to use a bigger CMS like Drupal was important... not the least of which was that it would be difficult to test of concepts like Check Box News with just a Blogger account.  Dave clarified what he meant by, "drop Drupal and blog".  He meant start blogging and I agreed with that. 

I thought that was going to be the end of the conversation, but today, Winer writes "But having a bunch of users is very important feature. You can't just skip over it as if it didn't matter, because imho it's all that matters." 

I don't think it is ALL that matters, but the faculty I work with at the Reynolds School of Journalism now agree that having an online community we can test ideas with as important as having the ideas to test.  Yesterday, we decided to keep OurTahoe.org running on Drupal and to do more 'traditional' online reporting and community building on that site and move the more experimental tools like Places and the Notebook to a new labs.ourtahoe.org site where students will hopefully blog about their ideas and the steps of their development process like the Multimedia undergrads at Bradley University do for their big projects.   I'm really hoping that the next student who has an idea like Voices will engage people like Dave Winer in a conversation on labs.ourtahoe.org about their idea before we actually build anything.  

My understanding has always been that the idea of an experiment is that you can learn as much from failure as success.  One of the problems with last year's approach was that we were trying to build a community around the content generated by the experiments.  It was unclear to new users what was an experiment and what was part of the core community/publishing system.  We wanted to create content that was "web2.0" and "visually engaging" despite the fact that a good part of the Lake Tahoe community can't get broadband and didn't have the most recent browser or plugins required to view the content.