Halfbakery

http://www.halfbakery.com/

Description
[|The Halfbakery] is a communal database of original, fictitious inventions, edited by its users. It was created by people who like to speculate, both as a form of satire and as a form of creative expression.

Halfbakery can be read by anyone, but only logged-in users can contribute. A user with an account can submit new ideas (the inventions) and add links and annotations to existing ideas. An account is currently gained by e-mailing the "bakesperson," an e-mail address provided on the site. Logged in users can also vote for or against a particular idea. Users are able to edit and delete their ideas, links, annotations, votes, and even their whole account. A few selected users can illustrate ideas, and the illustrations are linked to on the idea's page.

The site is run by the bakesperson, jutta, and a small group of volunteer moderators who can contribute ideas themselves and have rights to delete ideas, annotations and links provided by other users. Moderators, however, must adhere to guidelines and are generally forbidden from deleting the links or annotations of other users. Moderators are unable to see who cast votes or alter votes other than their own.

Analysis
The site is very community based, and is very much like a wiki site combined with the organizational look of craiglist. Various users, once they sign in, can edit, discuss, comment, link, add or submit new ideas onto the site. They can even vote and rate the idea. There's also the option that all user comments, links, and votes can be changed or removed by the users who posted them, and comments and links can also be removed by the idea creator. In a sense, this can create bias views but similarly, it enables freedom of expression.

The site is pretty easy to navigate, with search functions, various search headings like "best" and "random", and is organized into categories. There's also a cute labelling method with a mini icon next to next topic that changes depending on the the positive and negative value of the votes. This feature can help viewers easily navigate and select topics with the intention of either refuting or agreeing with it.

One very interesting thing about the site is that the style of writing on the Halfbakery is distinctive. Close attention is paid to grammatical, semantical and spelling mistakes, in contrast to other online forums. Writing is seldom overly formal, but too much slang or contraction is frowned upon. Ideas can be either serious or satirical, but ideas written too formally are not treated so well either. Lack of paragraph breaks is a sure-fire way to get told off. A common occurrence is a user giving a negative vote, promising to retract it once the offending mistakes have been removed. On this note, it gives the site a sort of style and identity, making it different and individualistic from other similar "idea-based" sites, a feature that might be interesting to incorporate in our own assignments.

Screenshot of home page:



References:

"Halfbakery." Wikipedia. September 2007. 25 October, 2007.