What's New in Digital Verse 3.0?

Although asthetically it looks much like the old Digital Verse site, so many changes have been made to this site that it is hard to remember everything that has happened. Here's a list in no particular order followed by four major developments....

• New Navigation - Finally the site has a decent menu with everything placed in a logical way similiar to most computer applications.
• Add/Edit Pages - A complete overhaul of the way the site handles your poetry, journals and cover art. The poetry manager contains options for editing ones work separate from the poem's details - hopefully making online composition easier.
• Separation of Preferences and Profile - because the old streaming page of options was a bit overwhelming..
• Pop Labels - for putting helpful hints where you need them and when you need them.
• Constant Rating Awareness - just look to the bottom of any page to know what ratings you are allowing yourself to see.
• Better Communication - the drop down menu now tells you how many of each form of communication you have left unanswered without some crazy code.
• Zip Code Search - for looking up other poets in your area.
• Video Journals - you can now embed the code for YouTube videos in your journal entries. Why? Why not?
• Advertising for Everyone! - see Free Membership for more.

Writing Circles

Writing Circles are more of a concept then an obvious feature of the site. One big strike which stands against DIY publishing sites like Digital Verse is the idea that your work is published just as soon as it appears online. The world of print is a bit starchier than the digital one and a proper editor won't touch a work she can find with a Google search, so what we have done is created the option to release a poem to your writing circle and no one else.

Poetry destined for your writing circle will only be visible to people who are actively watching you - and who you have let into your exclusive writing circle. The idea is that if you have just written a poem and believe it to be good enough for submission to a literary journal, you can send it out to your trusted writing circle and get some feedback first, possibly even some ideas which will make it better.

Manuscript Tracker

And once you do steel yourself to send out your work, you can also use Digital Verse's Manuscript Tracker to keep track of where you sent it, how long it has been at any one place, and what its status is - accepted, rejected, published, etc....

The Manuscript Tracker also is a useful tool in planning your submissions, allowing you to see how often you have sent work to a certain destination and whether or not it may be too soon to send them another.

Free Membership

One of the reasons it took so long for DigitalVerse 3.0 to come to fruition was a general lack of incentive. The idea behind DigitalVerse 1 & 2 was to have it be member driven with people paying $10 for a year's membership - which we would then use to buy advertising and help perpetuate the site's presence and increase its membership. After three years of work we managed to collect the grand total of $120 - and that's not after cost - that was sum total.

It just wasn't working. Even though the dreams and desire were there, we were stuck dead in the water. With the world economy only getting blacker and bleaker on the horizon it was decided to lift the site's ban on advertising and junk the paid membership system. One major problem online poetry sites have is maintaining their integrity against all the swindlers who believe poets to be easy pickings for their schemes. While it was very nice to have twelve people buy paid memberships, there is no telling how many potential members we lost because it seemed as if the site was only interested in selling memberships.

So now we have a single google ad on the bottom of the site and are giving away the membership for free. This isn't going to make anyone rich, but if enough people use it we may be able to afford to buy our own advertising again.

But is it ethical for Digital Verse to make money off of your poetry? Just in case you believe the answer to be No we also allow you to place advertising on the site. Yes -you- the poet. In preferences there is a space where you can put the code for your own advertisement and it will appear whenever a poem of yours is looked at. Go with something like Google Adsense and who knows? You may actually become one of those rare poets who can claim to have turned a dime on your poetry.

On the whole Digital Verse still frowns upon the matter of advertising, but since online ads themselves are not as garish as they once were and since we can't think of any other way of to stay self sufficient, this will be our new policy.

The Probationary Period

Another reason for the paid membership was the idea that people tend to respect what they have to pay for and it would cut down on site abuse. Since everything is free now, we have a 100 day probationary period on new members. During this time you can still do all of the basic stuff - posting poetry, leaving comments, writing journals, etc.... - but some of the more advanced and volatile aspects of the site are off limits - notably Cover Art and the inclusion of your own Advertising (mentioned above).