Our recent survey on 'real names' vs. pseudonyms in pen names

We have wanted to encourage (not require) readers to use their real names when commenting on The Economist web site. Our hope is that increased use of real names will help the quality of online discussion. We recently conducted a survey to learn what our online readers thought about this.

You strongly objected to compulsory use of real names, and for some this is not advisable or safe. We agree with this response. You rightly reminded us that what looks like real names on the site may not be so. It is neither feasible or sensible for us to ask people to prove the 'realness' of their online names.

Some said they feel personally safe to use their own name, but worry for others' safety and care for the candor and liveliness that safety makes possible. We received some insightful responses about the complexities of striving for freedom of speech, privacy and civility, among relative strangers online.

"Real names increase trust but hurt privacy."

"I'd rather put up with the occasional rudeness than with lack of encouragement for people to express their views freely."

On the whole, we were encouraged that you view the use of real names as helpful to the community because it increases accountability and thoughtfulness in posting, as long as this remains an option.

"Using people's real names encourages users to view fellow commenters as real people, rather than pixels on a screen."

It was heartening to hear how strongly many of our readers feel about protecting the vitality of free speech and respecting the privacy of individuals.

We have not made any changes to the site on this topic yet, but will keep you posted when we do. Meanwhile, we are continuing to work behind the scenes on other improvements.

The Economist now available on Kindle and Kindle DX

Kindle customers can find The Economist in the Amazon Kindle Store where they can purchase the weekly magazine and have it delivered wirelessly when the physical issue hits the newsstands.

To provide readers with comprehensive content, The Economist on Kindle will contain all charts and graphs available in the print form of the magazine and be available for $10.49 per month or $5.49 for a single weekly issue.

Kindle and Kindle DX are Amazon’s portable readers that wirelessly download books, magazines, newspapers, blogs, as well as personal and professional documents to a crisp, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and feels like real paper.

The Economist for the Kindle

Our new channel pages

Today we're unveiling the first small step in a major overhaul of our site's structure.

Over the next few months we'll revamp the pages on the site that match the sections of the print edition—Europe, Asia, Business, and so on.

At the moment, these are not much more than lists of the stories we print each week. They don't even include most of our web-only news, audio or video.

So we're replacing them with "channel pages". These will be updated daily. They will collect everything we have to offer about the day's top stories, and point you to some of the best analysis elsewhere on the web. They'll host short, lightly moderated online debates in which you, the readers, will hash out the day's burning questions. The best comments will be picked out by our editors.

Today we're launching preliminary versions of two channels: Business & Finance, and Science & Technology. Soon we'll launch more channels, and add graphics, embedded video and audio, and so on. In a few cases we'll split or merge sections: the new Business & Finance channel, for instance, combines the old business and finance & economics sections. But you need not worry about any bookmarks you've saved. They'll redirect automatically.

This change is long overdue. But the new pages are still very much a work in progress, and we want your thoughts on how to make them better. Please visit the new channels, and let us know what you think using the "Site feedback" links on the pages themselves.

The Economist Mobile

Being a loyal reader of this blog should have some benefits. With that thought in mind, it is my pleasure to invite you to preview the beta release of our mobile product.

Please point your mobile browsers to: m.economist.com

The current release includes:

Daily news and views

Selections from the current issue of The Economist:

• Politics this week
• Business this week
• KAL's cartoon
• Leaders
  
• Business
• Science and technology

Plus Gulliver on business travel

"Daily news and views" and "Gulliver" will be updated throughout the day.

Your opinion is important to us. We ask that if you try out the service that you share your impressions with us directly from your handset via the feedback link at the bottom of each page.

We encourage you to tell us and each other what you think about the service right here on the blog. Tell us what applications or content would be valuable for you to have. It would also be helpful to identify the handset device you use (in your comments) so we can better understand how we might customize solutions.

Reading text on the home page

We recently launched a set of changes to the typography on the home-page, in an attempt to make this page easier to read. While the change is not dramatic, it is one of a number of small changes that we continue to make all over the site. The choice to do this was based on responses we received from readers who submitted feedback, telling us that the text on the home-page has been hard to read.

For those of you who may be interested in the technical details, here are a few:

• The article links are bolder, in order to make them stand out more from the surrounding text.
• In the blogs area of the page we added a link to each blog (not just to the latest article in that blog).
• In the 'Most commented' area the linked portion of the text is limited to the article title, in order to make that part stand out -- long stacks of links on multiple lines can be hard to read.
• We worked on finding a better fit in the smaller areas.

We are not able to respond individually to most of the feedback that we get through the site feedback link (on the top right of every page on the site). But we do welcome this feedback and find it useful, so please do continue to submit feedback this way, as you read or use the site.

Is the home-page easier to read after this recent change, or not? And have you ever noticed or submitted feedback through that site feedback link?

Fall preview

We are planning our fall product release schedule and I wanted to give our "Behind the curtain" readers an early rundown of what is coming. We hope where possible to be able to get some early user feedback from you.

The Global Electoral College: Early next week we will be launching a voting simulation application that will allow all of our registered users to "mark their ballots" in the US presidential election. Using the US electoral college methodology votes will be tallied and assigned with "winner take all" results for each and every country. While we expect the balloting to be fun, we will also be encouraging a serious discussion on the election. As they say in Chicago, vote early and often!

Mobile Edition: A relaunch of our mobile edition as a free (currently requires a subscription) ad supported product. It will include our Daily News Analysis features, selections from the Economist print edition and Business Travel tips from our Gulliver Blog.

The World in 2009 Predictions Blog - This year our readers will be able to engage with our World in 2009 editors to do some crystal ball gazing and participate in identifying and discussing trends and events which will surface over the next 12 months . In November we will launch The World in 2009 online fully integrated into Economist.com with comments and interactive maps.


The Economist Debate Platform 2.0: We just began to review the final designs and functionality for our debate platform and I am really excited by the improvements that the design and UX team have been able to incorporate into the debate experience. We will have improved debate navigation, better comment viewing including comments by debate phase, comment views by most recent/least recent and most recommended. Debate 2.0 will also include an expanded archive that will be much easier to use plus a downloadable version of each debate for sharing and printing.

If you are in New York in late October The Economist will presenting three reader events including two live debates. We will post more about these events over next few weeks. If you will be attending any of these events please let us know so we can say hello.

What makes the "severe contest" more severe?

In our previous post on changes to our debate user experience to make the “severe contest” more severe, Katy Zei asked:

I would like to know exactly what Ben meant by severe. Do you mean intellectually demanding or more carefully structured?

It’s a good question, Katy Zei, and something we have been discussing with our editors, brand marketers, product developers, partners (and now readers!) in the past few weeks.

The phrase “severe contest” comes from the introductory article attached to our first print issue, published by our founder, James Wilson, in 1843. The subject of Wilson’s article was the rise of protectionist sentiment in Britain and began with the observation that, despite growing prosperity and the extension of “morality, intelligence and civilisation”

the great material interests of the higher and middle classes, and the physical condition of the labouring and industrial classes, are more and more marked by characters of uncertainty and insecurity.

Wilson blamed this state of affairs on “commercial restrictions”, which

raise up barriers to intercourse, jealousies, animosities and heartburnings between individuals and classes in this country, and again between this country and all others

and declared that the political battle was

a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy timid ignorance obstructing our progress.

My personal take on the severe contest is that it describes the endless struggle between those who fight by proving and demonstrating the rightness of an idea (such as free trade) and those who fight by preying on uncertainty and insecurity to stoke up populist fears. The world of ideas thrives on the courage to embrace challenging (and often unpopular) opinions and the intelligence needed to discover the right answer. The other side of the conflict draws on the fear of change or challenge and ignorance of guiding principles and facts. The battle is endless because the rightness of an idea must be re-proven again and again in the court of public opinion: the forces of timidity and ignorance are never destroyed but merely quelled at best.

As publishers, how can we help to make this severe contest more severe? Surely, the answer is different for every age. In 1842, Wilson’s solution was to launch a newspaper. What about today, with all the technologies and communications infrastructure that we have at our finger tips? I don’t think that anyone has yet come up with a satisfactory answer to that question: a lot of innovation lies ahead, particularly for online publishing. But here are some thoughts about the ingredients we might need:

1. Diversity of thought, ideas and opinion. Our editors and guests can provide some of this. Our readers can provide more: the more fine minds that we convene and help to engage with each other, the more severe the contest.
2. A place or mechanisms for ideas and opinions to connect and compete with each other to prove and demonstrate their rightness, or fitness. This needs lots of innovation in online publishing – and in particular in social computing.
3. Impact. The severe contest is all about beating (or at least quelling) the forces of timid ignorance. A large enough publishing venture is needed for the right ideas to make a difference.
4. Global reach. All the most important and pressing issues are global in nature, more so now even than when Wilson published our first issue in 1843. If our problems are global, the ideas we find to solve them need to be global too – and they have to influence and shape the behaviour of a global audience.

How well are we doing by these yardsticks? Or are these measures of severity wrong or incomplete?

By the way, doug, you asked about future changes to our online debates. We are rebuilding this part of the site now and plan to launch something new in the autumn. I hope we can arrange for some of our readers to test the new platform before we launch and give us feedback on its likely severity. In the meantime, we have forthcoming online debates on energy and the US elections, which I hope you will find useful and interesting (and at least mildly severe).