Welcome to the future.

Today, The Collegian is unveiling the most recent addition to both the print and online editions of the newspaper: Web-Spe@k.

If you were around last semester, you may remember that The Collegian Online underwent some major renovations, culminating in the introduction of the remodeled Web site on March 1 of last year.

The project was the fruition of a three-semester effort, helmed by former Webmaster Bryan Harley and aided by our multimedia staff, including current Webmaster, Joe Hollak.

Since the redesign, Harley has graduated, but left his legacy with a more attractive, more intuitive and ultimately more functional Web site.

The redesign also helped spur an even greater interest in The Collegian Online — one month after the new Web site launched, readership of The Collegian Online had nearly doubled, with the number of unique visitors approximately 171 percent of what it had been before the redesign.

Additionally, the new version of The Collegian Online offered visitors the option of commenting directly on stories and columns, rather than limiting viewers to making comments through the online forum.

Since then, our Web site has maintained the higher traffic, and with the new commenting abilities, interaction with our online community soared.

This increase in activity helped propel The Collegian Online to a first-place award from the California Collegiate Media Association for Best Interactivity, one of three first-place awards the Web site had received from the organization by the end of last semester.

Indeed, we began noticing that interaction online is comparable to — if not at times greater than — direct interaction with our editorial staff.

Besides the amount of activity on the Web site, we found that a good deal of the comments we were receiving were frequently insightful, witty and even at times passionate.

In many ways, the ability to comment became for our online community what letters to the editor have been for print newspapers.

This realization was the genesis for Web-Spe@k.

In essence, the idea behind the new feature is to introduce a series of hot-topic issues in our print edition and on our Web site, directly soliciting comments from our readers.

We then publish excerpts from these comments as fodder to generate further discussion among readers who might be missing out on the online discussions.

For our newspaper, and indeed, for the print journalism world in general, the notion of letting online content help fuel and facilitate print content is a revolutionary idea and there is not a precedent for what we are trying to achieve.

Because there is little in the way of protocol for this type of move, we did run into several roadblocks along the way.

The difference, for instance, between letters to the editor and the comments on the Web site is the issue of accountability.

Letters to the editor have identities attached to them and go through a confirmation process that is simply not feasible with our online content.

As such, our editorial and multimedia teams jointly decided to publish the majority of these comments in the print edition anonymously.

In addition, we will be making efforts to confirm comments we find particularly compelling, listing them in a separate, secondary section entitled “Web-Spe@k Exclusives.â€Â

For our first topic, we decided on the issue of the Fresno State mascot, introduced at our first football game of the season against the Sacramento State Hornets.

The feature has thus far generated a flurry of discussion, quickly becoming one of the single most popular items on our Web site, both in the number of views as well as in the number of comments.

We̢۪ve tried to accurately reflect the general response from the Web site in the way we̢۪ve chosen our excerpts. In this instance, comments were mostly negative, though Timeout did find a few defenders.

We would also like to stress that comments featured in Web-Spe@k are not intended in any way to reflect the views of the staff of The Collegian and should not be construed as any sort of editorial opinion.

Rather, these are the voices of our online readers, the voices of the Fresno State community.

There is a world of discussion going on at The Collegian Online that the print edition of our paper, until now, hardly acknowledged.

We hope you enjoy this new addition to The Collegian and The Collegian Online and strongly encourage you, if you can find the time, to participate.