Pinned notebooks
Not just riffing on github features, but I think it would be nice to show what others created > and pinned as their top works.
Sorry if this comes across as a rant:
Pinned items is only the most minimal kind of workaround for what I call the STORK (‘infinite STream Of Random Krap’) pattern now pervasive on the web. (edit: cf. How the Blog Broke the Web - Stacking the Bricks)
What web communities desperately need if the goal is to serve authors and readers (instead of just juicing ‘engagement’ numbers) is curation and at least a modicum of permanence. Blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Reddit, YouTube, newspaper websites, … all suffer from the conversation-killing feature that everything that shows up on one of them is almost immediately pushed off the top page by the next round of ‘content’, and the stream volume is so high that if you didn’t notice something in the brief window of first impact, it will probably scroll past and you’ll never see it. If a conversation starts, it often dies within a day, and consists largely of strangers talking past each-other. Obscure algorithms decide what readers should get to see and when.
The big internet community success in the opposite direction is Wikipedia. There, the produced artifacts are permanent, communal, and constantly improving. Conversations are long-running and it is easy to track down past parts of the conversation. But Wikipedia was born in a different time on the internet, when mailing lists, web forums, personal websites, etc. were still used in preference to centralized ‘social platforms’.
For now the best way to curate and discuss Observable notebooks is somewhere outside of Observable (e.g. private email, web forums, face to face conversations, personal websites, …)
The Observable ‘Collections’ feature is a start, but it is not generally accessible.
Wikipedia. Different medium for a much broader audience in my opinion and perfectly suited on how it’s build out.