9neighbors

www.9neighbors.com is a collection of news from many sources, including readers, that is then rated and put in order of the most popular stories. Unfortunately, I just don't get it. If this site hadn't been explained to me in class, I would have no idea what was going on. The About Us section is 3 sentences long and gives a vague idea of what the site is about:

9Neighbors is a community-ranked news site for the Boston area. Stories here are
submitted and voted on by users. The site is edited and moderated byRick Burnes.

Even still, I'm left with a lot of questions. Do I HAVE to join or can I post without being a member? How do I vote? What are the communities and what do they have to do with the site? Are they they only places the news comes from? Are the top streams daily? weekly? overall? On Monday there was a link to the 9neighbors blog prominently at the top of the site and at least the blog had a bit more in depth explanation, although you really had to hunt it down. Now the link is teeny and all the way at the bottom of the page.

Although I feel that the concept of this site holds potential, it still needs a lot of work. At the moment I think that the editors have forgotten to look at this site from the perspective of someone who has never seen anything like this. In my opinion everything needs to be clarified and explained somewhere in the site.