Plastic.com Invites Visitors to Shape the Site

A cousin to Slashdot, Plastic.com offers a general interest message board for cultural critics.

Alexandra Barrett, special to PCWorld.com

No, Plastic.com is not the home page for an industry trade association, nor does it promote the joys of consumer credit card abuse. But if you stick around this new site long enough, you very well might read articles on those topics, not to mention a hundred other issues that you don't know interest you.

Think of Plastic.com as a peer to Salon, Feed, or Slate, an online news magazine tackling everything from art to politics to technology. Plastic is different, however, in one critical respect: It doesn't actually publish any of its own material. Instead, Plastic posts links to articles its editors and readers find across the Web. On a recent visit to Plastic, for example, I found links to Senator Orrin Hatch's Web site, a Register article on disposable cell phones, and a Yahoo News report on a possible AIDS vaccine.

Plastic's original contribution is a forum to discuss the diverse news pieces it promotes. At Plastic, readers' comments are what it's all about. As proof of this priority, it's much easier, navigationally speaking, to find out what Plastic readers think about an article than it is to read the article itself. Links to reader comments are big and obvious; links to the text in question are embedded deep within the editor's introductory text.

But Plastic's format will feel quite familiar to anyone who reads Slashdot, a technical news forum. That's partly because the two sites use the same software, the open source Slashcode, to drive their message boards.

Collaboration Drives Content

How the articles get posted onto Plastic is another interesting aspect of the site. Plastic euphemistically bills itself as "a collaboration between the world's smartest readers and the world's smartest editors." Collaboration, you quickly learn, means readers as well as editors submit stories. A big, red "submit story" button figures prominently on every page.

That's not to say that everything readers suggest makes it onto the site. Quite to the contrary. Plastic's editors play an important role in ferreting out stories and sifting through readers' story ideas and comments.

Editors also rate reader comments. This allows you to filter the quality of comments that you want to read. You can choose to see all of them, only those from readers prized by Plastic's editors, or somewhere in between. Readers whom editors really love eventually become site moderators, which means that they too can rate other readers' comments.

Here's the upshot: You'll probably really enjoy Plastic if you have the same basic tastes as Plastic's editors. Be forewarned, however: This is not a site that caters to mainstream sensibilities.

Each of Plastic's sections is staffed by an editor that hails from one of the Web's hipper, liberal sites--Wired, The New Republic, and Nerve, to name a few. If you gravitate toward those sorts of publications, and you enjoy making yourself heard, you'll probably fit right in. Otherwise, file Plastic under sites to visit when you're looking to while away some time.