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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.