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When I referred to a post in which journalism professor Jay Rosen of New York University expressed concern over how Mother Jones addressed the political web in its package "Politics 2.0" I was surprised that Clara Jeffery, one of the magazine's co-editors, commented on my post (and then another time).  Jeffery defends the magazine's reporting, and while I'll stand by my stance, I would like to point out that Mother Jones seems to get blog outreach much better than most other news organizations.

In response to criticism in the blogosphere sparked by Rosen's piece on his Press Think and Huffington Post blogs, Mother Jones staffers — including editors — dispersed and joined the commenters in discussing the piece.  Clearly, the magazine is defending its reporting, and it sees the importance of participating in the dialog.  By chiming in it gets to present its side of the story while bypassing middlemen (if bloggers allow unrestricted commenting), directly address questions of potential readers, and challenge the criticism directly.  Further, by doing this in the comment section, they get their input out in the open, and in some cases it is close to the actual criticism.  Besides, why challenge the on-line political pundits if you're not willing to defend yourself on their turf?

While I haven't noticed such action before, I feel that it is important to point to Mother Jones as an example.  It has shown that it is not afraid to use the Internet to debate, defend itself, and interact with normal folk.  Unfortunately far too many journalists and news organizations cower behind their pretentious job titles and virtually ignore the opportunity to strengthen ties with fans, win over some enemies, or maybe at least foster respect from an opponent.  Blog outreach efforts engages the audience and perhaps turns it into a community.

Way to go!

Facebook is the New AOL

Jason Kottke expresses the concern a growing number of people are having about Facebook:

“As it happens, we already have a platform on which anyone can communicate and collaborate with anyone else, individuals and companies can develop applications which can interoperate with one another through open and freely available tools, protocols, and interfaces. It’s called the internet and it’s more compelling than AOL was in 1994 and Facebook in 2007.”

Facebook has “thrown the entire startup world for a loop”

Valleywag speculates that the market for Facebook applications may already be saturated. They also explain how some changes in the platform are preventing new applications from going as viral as those that were available on launch.

Not Another Socnet

Joe Mansour makes the argument against Presidential candidate’s building their own social networks online:

“Most of the people who will make a profile will be the hardcore activists who already have a profile on Facebook. Furthermore, the work they’re doing to create content on the campaign’s own little internal socnet isn’t reaching anyone beyond the gated community….These in-house socnets, like Clinton’s, suck energy, time and resources away from where activists should be focused: reaching out to undecided, or as yet unengaged voters, and instead channel the focus inward. In effect the campaign is connecting with itself.”

MSNBC Launches Newsbreaker Online Game

Rohit Bhargava, who is a great blogger and a very smart guy, really likes it. I think it is pointless.

Recently, we launched a blog network for Georgetown Preparatory School's Summer ESL Program .  The purpose of this project was to give the Georgetown Prep teachers a new way to communicate with their students, and to give the students a new way to practice their English language skills. Also, we wanted to give our staff an opportunity to experiment with WordPress Mu (pronounced "mew"), the multi-user blog program.  Just launched on Monday, the students at teachers over at GPrep are already starting to get the hang of things, with three of the seven classes at this year's summer camp taking advantage of the blog.  The best example is Mr. Scronce's blog.  This teacher gives his students a daily topic to write about, related to class discussions or readings.  Currently, the students are reading and discussing the book Kaffir Boy, so they wrote some blog entries about their initial reactions to the book.  The teacher made grammatical corrections using different text colors in each student's blog entry.

For the Georgetown Prep blog network, we set up each class has its own blog, with the teachers registered as "editors" and the students registered as "authors".  These blogs are linked together using blogrolls on the domain gprepblogs.bivings.com.  We tried to keep the site as simple as possible, and did little customized work (we tweaked the colors and header of a WordPress theme but did little else). 

For individual users, WordPress Mu seems to be working great.  Thus far, the teachers and students have had no problems accessing and contributing to their blogs.  I think this speaks to the ease with which WordPress functions: few or none of the people from this group have a lot of experience with computers or technology, and they are able to successfully contribute to an online discussion.

However, from an administrative perspective, things get a bit confusing.  I have a significant amount of experience with the administrative tools within WordPress, so I took on the task of setting up all of the users in the GPrep blog network.  In all, there are 8 blogs, consisting of a total of 8 teachers (editors) and about 90 students (authors).  Since we wanted to simplify the process for the teachers and students using the site, we set up their user accounts ahead of time, using a variation of my personal email address.  This way, all the users had to do was login and start writing.  For me, however, things were a bit more difficult.

Although there is a "site admin" portion of WordPress Mu which gives administrators access to all the backends of all the blogs in the network, the process for signing up new users is a bit clumsy.  First, they have to be registered with the main site.  Then, they have to be added to the blog to which they will be contributing.  So basically, as I was setting up this blog network, I had to add each user to the system twice.  This was annoying.  I suppose this process is easier for individuals who want to register themselves with a WordPress Mu site, but unfortunately we didn't have the luxury of letting people register themselves.

The site navigation is also a bit clumsy from the backend.  It's a little difficult to switch between blogs if you are managing several at the same time.  Once you enter the backend of a blog, there is no way to return to the backend of the main administration panel or to the panels of other blogs without first returning to the live site or typing in the wp-admin URL. 

It was also annoying that I had to manually enter the blogroll 9 times (once on each teacher blog and once on the main site).  I was really hoping that because these blogs were all created under the same umbrella that there would be an automatic way to link them together and aggregate their content.  While our main developer did find eventually find a plugin that publishes the most recent post from each blog on the front page, we didn't find any other way to aggregate the rest of the content, categories, comments, or authors.  This was our developer's major complaint.  Apparently, while most regular WordPress plugins work with the individual blogs in the network, there aren't many effective tools for aggregating information on the site.  For example, with the GPrep blog network, we wanted the main blog to act as an aggregator for all of the content on each of the individual teacher blogs, rather than as a blog itself.  We found this really difficult to do, mostly for a lack of plugins.  While WordPress Mu probably works great for someone who has many blogs or for groups of individual bloggers, it doesn't work all that well for "networks" of blogs, where all the content is aggregated under one main umbrella.  Our developer noted that WordPress Mu seems a bit incomplete and that for our purposes, Drupal would have been a better choice.

I don't dobut that WordPress Mu is a powerful tool for managing many individual blogs from one place or grouping blogs together through one site.  However, for developing a network of blogs that share content, WordPress Mu gets a bit tricky and is need of some additional features.

When I first heard that the BBC assigned a reporter, Ben Hammersley, to report about Turkey's elections via several social networks, I wondered how the Beeb would present the reporting. 

Would it just leave all the information at the individual sites and hope that people would navigate to the other reporting?  Would it place links or somehow coax the social networks to allow it to advertise the other sites on each reporting page?  Or would it cull all the data into one place?

It has chosen the third option; see the Webreporter: Turkish journey page.  I like how this page serves as a quasi-portal to the reporting spread out over various sites.  This serves as a place for the reporting to combine while maintaining a consistent layout (with the exception of the Google map with Hammersley's route) but still leaves reporting spread out.  In a sense, the reporting serves as bait to lure flickr, del.icio.us, Twitter, etc. users to the BBC's site — a rather interesting marketing campaign.  I wonder how Twitter, Yahoo!, Google, etc. feel about this.

Oh yeah, thanks for the link and traffic to my previous post, BBC.  I'm chuffed.

With all the hype surrounding tomorrow's release of Apple's iPhone, I had to throw my two cents in.  There are reports that both praise and criticize Apple's newest addition to its family of trendy tech products, and both sides have some good points.  The pro-iPhone camp is excited about having a sleek, attractive, all-in-one device that offers a fantastic web browser and a great screen.  Those hesitant about the iPhone argue that the device is overpriced, unproven, lacks sufficient storage, and limits customers to signing a two-year contract with AT&T.  In addition, questions about the device's "keyboard" still remain.

For me, I think it would be fantastic to have one device that combines my phone, iPod, and web browsing in a pocket-sized package.  However, I can't see myself shelling out $600 for the phone and $2,000 over two years for the service. The phone's 14-day return policy also makes me a bit wary.  I, for one, will definitely be waiting for at least version 2.0 before I can even seriously consider buying this smart phone.

Still deciding?  Check out these CNET videos: Top 5 Reasons to Love the iPhone and Top 5 Worst Things About the iPhone .

What about you?  Will you be waiting in line on Friday?

[Poll=9]

New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen harangues Mother Jones, the left-leaning investigatory magazine, for its feature package titled "Politics 2.0" in which it basically asks, "Are we entering a new era of digital democracy-or just being conned by a bunch of smooth-talking geeks?"

Rosen, an open source advocate, accuses that "The Mother Jones editors had a great story about politics and the web within their grasp, but they were too busy fabricating myths they could bust up later— and so they missed it."

So, what do y'all think about Politics 2.0?  How would you answer MoJo's questions like:

Blogs, social networking, and viral video are redefining where political discussion takes place. But are they just replacing the old machine bosses with a new group of bullies?

Is old media dead, or is the blogosphere just a flash in the pan?

I don't think that Politics 2.0 is dead since most of the major 2008 presidential hopefuls are courting bloggers, using video sites like YouTube, or deploying social networks on their campaign sites.  In fact, it probably is growing since the mainstream media just loves covering politics on the Internet as well.  However, I'm biased.

Our blog has run off Wordpress for awhile now and for the most part we’ve been pretty free of comment and trackback spam. The Akismet plugin combined with some manual intervention on occasion has usually been all that was needed to keep our comments area relatively clean. Akismet has blocked 300,000 spam comments since we started using it.

The last few months, however, our spam problem has been getting progressively worse and we’re all spending more time than we want to manually deleting comments that make it through. We’ve installed two additional plugins to try to address the problem.

(1) Comment Timeout

In our case, most of the comment spam has been on posts buried deep in our archives. This plugin automatically closes comments on posts after 180 days of active commenting.

(2) Protect Web Form

We installed this plugin that makes users enter an annoying little code when posting a comment. This helps prevent the bots from automatically posting comments. I hate these things and we may take it off and hope the Comment Timeout works by itself.

Since making these changes, we haven’t gotten any spam comments at all. So mission accomplished. But in the process we’ve also ended the conversation on our older posts and made it a little harder for people to post comments.

Anybody else have any better ideas for how to deal with comment/trackback spam?

As we noted a few weeks ago, CNN launched a new beta site to test its features for its forthcoming relaunch scheduled for next week on July 1st.  The beta site is now off-line.  Senior Vice President and Senior Executive Producer Mitch Gelman explains on the beta site's blog that:

We've absorbed and dissected that feedback so we can evolve and craft a CNN.com that works for you.

So, to respond your suggestions, we took the Beta offline on Tuesday, June 26. We’re making some changes based on the thoughts you sent us…

Personally I find this strategy rather interesting.  Why not make one tweak at a time and make sure that the adjustments are what people wanted before officially lauching?

We'll just have to see how people react to the tweaks CNN is making based upon its feedback from its beta period. 

I openly admit that I don't get the whole point of twitter.  I'm not that interesting, and the stuff I do isn't either.  However, some people love it.

Well, twittervision makes tweets that much more interesting as it shows the geographic location of a tweet on a Google map of the world.  This seems like an interesting use of a Google API.  In fact, seeing tweets pop up from all over the world is fascinating.  Perhaps this is how I'll get hooked… (Click on the image for a clearer view)

This morning Todd gave me the somewhat amusing task of tracking down some cool applications on Facebook.  In browsing through the network's new features, I realized that there are applications for just about any activity imaginable, from tracking restaurants, movies, and music, to adding pictures of cute bunnies to one's profile.  A lot of these applications remind me of features available on MySpace, including the photo slideshow applications and the "top friends" apps, which allow you to designate who your "best friends" are within your profile.  There are, however, some really useful and interesting ideas that developers have come up with for Facebook. A few of my favorites are listed below.

Useful Apps 

I am all for tools that enable me to condense all my web surfing in one place.  The Feeds application allows you to list all your favorite RSS feeds in your profile by creating a Feed Book. The application also helps you share your feeds with friends and see what feeds are the most popular across the whole network. Digg and del.icio.us also have useful applications that let you display and keep track of your bookmarks using Facebook.

In a similar vein, Flickr Photos allows you to link your Flickr account and your Facebook profile, making all of your photos accessible via Facebook. This is a big time saver for people like me who have tons of digital pictures but hate having to use the Facebook upload tool. 

Two more that I like are Netflix Movies and Flixster.  Netflix Movies displays your Netflix queue and "movies at home" in your profile and updates it once a day.  You can also find friends who are on Netflix. Flixster lets you rate movies and get recommendations from friends.

I also like the idea behind Hangouts, which lets you tell your friends where you're going and keep track of places you like to go.  You can also see what your friends think about some of your favorite hangouts. Eating fits in here, as it lets you track your favorite foods and restaurants.  Use those with Unthirsty, a happy hour finder, and you've got yourself a weekend.

Avid readers might want to check out Visual Bookshelf, iRead, and Books, which let you keep track of your library, rate books, and find others who have books you want to read. 

Not so useful, but still fun 

Besides the useful apps listed above, Facebook is chock full of applications that are pretty useless but still fun and entertaining.

Locational apps like Map Your Friends and Where I've Been let you track your travels and friends' locations on maps. 

The Compass helps you determine your political leanings, while Polls lets you ask your friends questions.

Finally, who wouldn't want pictures of cute bunnies in their profiles? 

By opening its platforms to developers, Facebook is now offering its users a fully customizable environment.  Prior to these developments, a major criticism of the network was that it didn't offer the flexibility of MySpace, which has endless widgets available for its user profiles.  I think this increased flexibility factor is helping Facebook vault to the lead in terms of social networking popularity . 

In all the talk about the Ron Paul online machine, there has been very little discussion of his actual campaign website, which has recently undergone a facelift. His approach is novel. Instead of building an infrastructure on his own campaign website. like most candidates have done, Paul has created a portal to his presences on various third party websites.

The Paul website itself essentially consists of a homepage, an issues section, a bio page, a donation form, a sign up form and a blog. Interestingly for the social candidate, his blog doesn’t even allow comments. Instead, it encourages visitors to discuss/interact with the blog content on social sites like Digg, del.icio.us, StumbleUpon and Facebook. He seems to deliberately avoid building a community on his own site. Due to this, supporters have no choice but to organize elsewhere.

Paul relies on third party tools for fundamental aspects of his website:

(1) Videos are entirely hosted and served from his YouTube account.

(2) Campaign news gathering and discussion of said news is done via Digg. Paul is the only candidate I’ve seen that includes a prominent link to a Digg search of his name right on his own homepage.

(3) Paul’s schedule is kept exclusively on Eventful.

(4) Supporters are encouraged to create their own events on Meetup.

(5) Campaign gear is sold exclusively through a store hosted by Cafe Press.

(6) All photos are on Flickr.

(7) Social networking occurs on Facebook and MySpace.

His website is basically a mashup of all this stuff, with only a few core functions being performed by the website itself. Lots of campaigns have played around with this stuff. Paul is the only one I’ve seen that truly relies on these tools to perform mission critical campaign functions.

Obviously, as a long shot candidate with a limited budget, the use of these free tools is done out of necessity. But the strategy here is also very sound: by not giving supporters much to do on his own site he maximizes the amount of noise they make in other venues. It is the perfect approach for an insurgent candidate like Paul.

As 2008 grows nearer, I’d expect other insurgent candidates to mimic the Paul approach. Front runners? Not so much at this point. The buzz this approach creates is great, but there is also a lot to be said for having control over all these tools and all the data they generate.

Fred Thompson disclosure.

Is BBC News going platform agnostic?

The British journalism trade publication Press Gazette reports that BBC reporter Ben Hammersley will report through several social networks from four cities in Turkey in the two weeks prior to the country's general elections in July.  He'll also appear on BBC World, the World Service, News 24, and BBC News Online during this time. (Hat tip: Kevin Anderson)

Hammersley's work is part of the Beeb's effort to fulfill its 15 web principles that it published in February.  The fifth states: "Treat the entire web as a creative canvas: don’t restrict your creativity to your own site."

Richard Sambrook, director of BBC Global News, says, "This is an experiment to look at how a series of international reports can be spread through social media sites and hopefully reach new audiences."

Here's where Hammersley will likely file reports:

• Ben Hammersley's blog
• Ben Hammersley's Twitter feed
• Ben Hammersley's Flickr photo stream
• Ben Hammersley's del.ico.us bookmarks
• Ben Hammersley's YouTube videos

Let's see how he reports.  The Washington Post's Howard Kurtz has an interesting approach; he pasted one of his column in a series of wall posts on his Facebook profile…

We've talked about lots of different ways blogs can be used here on TBR, but the blog written by the Japanese ministers of health provides us with some new material.  In response to increasing obesity rates in Japan, Vice-ministers Noritoshi Ishida and Keizo Takemi pledged in December to lose at least 5 kg (11 lbs).  To hold them to their promises, the ministry of health provided these officials with a blog where they track their progress, list the foods they are eating, and describe their exercise regiments.  According to the Washington Post, this strategy has worked for Takemi, who has surpassed his goal by losing about 16 lbs.

What's so remarkable about this topic isn't that these Japanese ministers are losing weight or that they are setting a good example of healthy lifestyles.  Rather, what I find interesting, is that this is an example of high-ranking officials using the internet in a real way. The vice minister admits that losing weight and sticking to a healthy diet hasn't been easy, but hopes that his experience will be helpful to others trying to lose weight.

I found this story quite surprising given the general lack of participation online by Japanese politicians and the overall informal nature of blogging in Japan. For example, while many American companies use blogs as a tool for marketing, discussing corporate issues, or reaching out to customers, it is quite uncommon for Japanese corporations to have official blogs (we discovered this last year when we were researching the prevalence of corporate blogs here in the states).  Similarly, when researching for our international political website study last year, we also read that while the Japanese were pioneers of using the web for political campaigns, this campaign tactic has fallen by the wayside–Japanese campaign websites were less common than their American counterparts.  The health blog of ministers Takemi and Ishida are thus setting a great example for politicians seeking to use the web in new, interesting, and productive ways.

Some of the 2008 Presidential hopefuls are campaigning on multiple official sites.  In these cases, the candidates are selecting issues on which they're strong.

This strategy has potential as it enables campaigns to make headway by creating a special site to build a community around a specific issue and to project a clear message that can standalone from the rest of the campaign platform. 

Here are four of these standalone campaign sites:

• Bill Richardson's No Troops Left Behind
• This site only promotes Richardson's opposition to the war in Iraq and his stance to remove all troops from that country soon.  His campaign has a petition where people can show their support for removing the troops and links to other places where potential voters can see him express his stance.

• Joe Biden's Head to Head 08
• On this site the Biden Campaign allows visitors to see YouTube videos of other Democratic presidential hopefuls speak about the same issue in hopes that they'll see how the candidates differ.

• Joe Biden's Plan for Iraq
• A couple years ago the Democrats seem ed disjointed about how to deal with the war in Iraq; the party simply wanted it to end but failed to offer a plan to do so.  Senator Biden presented a plan, and he continues to view this as a strength.  Thus, his campaign has created a site for this plan.

• John McCain's Mitt vs. Facts (not launched as of this posting)
• On this site, the McCain campaign hopes to expose all the flip flops that Mitt Romney has made.  For instance, many conservatives are concerned about how he has taken different stances on immigration and social issues while running for office in Massachusetts versus now that he's running for President.

Are there other political campaign sites like these?

I look forward to see how these highly targeted mini-sites affect the election.  Further, I wonder if a site focused on differentiating or digging up dirt about another candidate will have more of an effect than a site that trumps a strong stance of a candidate.

The design of John Edwards’ MySpace page is pretty broken right now. As you’ll see below, page elements are getting pushed to the left and it is generally not looking as intended.

If a campaign website was messed up this bad we’d undoubtedly write something snarky. But, having done battle with MySpace ourselves, we can only feel sympathy for the folks at the Edwards’ campaign. They are fighting a losing battle. (more…)