As Bakerstreet recently wrote, a website like JoeUser.com represents an evolutionary step in blogging. The idea is for people to be able to have their own blogs about whatever they want.

But where JoeUser.com differs is that we want to create a system in which people who write blogs have a chance of having their works get more exposure than they would elsewhere. Hence, the point system. People come to JoeUser.com, they then are presented with top articles of the day, newest articles, top articles of the past month, top blog sites of the past month and articles that have recently gotten comments on them. And on top of that, articles of INTEREST appear in full on the home page.

As you can imagine, we are always skirting the fine line between wanting to let people do whatever they want on their own blogs without it conflicting with the rights of other users.

So we do have some new features to that end that are out or will be out soon:

• Black Listing. You can now prevent specific users from being able to comment on your articles. If there is someone who annoys the heck out of you, then you can keep them from responding to any of your articles. You black list someone by clicking on their name and pressingthe black list button. You unblacklist someone by going to the settings for your blog in "My account".
• Null Articles. Admins of the site will be able to set certain articles as not being able to amass points. We don't want to censor anyone's articles. But at the same time, we've seen cases where a company will have an article to let others respond and communicate with it manage to get so many points that it shows up in the top 10 lists. That's not real fair to others. The other area, which will surely annoy some people, is that we will probably start penalizing the points of articles that are not really that person's articles. That is, people who repost other people's articles from other sites with excessive quoting. There is a fine line between quoting another article as part of YOUR article and simply reposting someone else's material in an attempt to get attention to your blog.  The quoted material shouldn't be why people are reading your blog. YOUR writings or observations are why people should be reading your blog. Otherwise, eventually, the site would be overrun by people gaming the point system with tons of articles that are essentially excerpts from other sites.  People who write their own material are the ones that we want to see in the top lists.  We won't stop people from writing articles that are pushing the envelope on fair use of quoted material, but we won't let them use those articles to make their way into the top articles and blogs either.
• [Explicit Content] You can mark your article as having adult content so that younger readers won't be able to see it. The rules here would be much the same rules as TV or movies. Nudity, sexual content, etc. are things that don't belong on this site in a place where children may see it. Please make sure you use the adult content (99% of people here are adults so you're not really restricting yourself) checkbox.
• Kudos and Access. We now have the ability to raise people's access. But we don't currently display that information anywhere.  We will slowly be adding in more apparent access markers for people along with Kudo markers in people's blogs and in their profile to let people see what things they've accomplsiehd "Top bloggers", "1000 points", "100th article", and so forth. Just little ways of giving kudos to people who have achieved success.

So this is what's upcoming. We hope you like the enhancements.  The site will remain free but we do plan to start makign available extra features (backing up blogs to local disk, a blog navigator program, multiple blog sites and blog groups, net storage, etc.) soon for a small monthly fee as an option.