Over the weekend Al Jazeera English asked YouTubbers – through its Washington, DC based anchor Ghida Fakhry – for feedback about the channel via video responses. As of this posting 34 responses from 30 people are posted.  

While I applaud the channel for sparking such interaction, there's some risk on having viewers participate in a third party venue.  By using YouTube, Al Jazeera has little control over how other people respond to the submitted videos.  Like any other on-line forum, those who comment on YouTube videos aren't always that polite.  YouTube veterans know this and deal with it by not allowing or moderating comments (or simply not caring), but a novice may not understand this reality.

Hopefully, someone whose first submission to YouTube is a response to Fakhry's question is received respectfully by the site's community.  If not, that person may feel burned and upset that they subjected themselves to the incivility that is unfortunately common on the Internet.  If Al Jazeera English hosted this activity on its own site, then it could better manage the comments that people leave for the videos.  In that way the channel can better protect the community that it is trying to form through this outreach.

Having said that, I think Al Jazeera English on YouTube is great.  This partnership has enabled the channel to expose its content in a forum that is well known throughout the world (particularly in the USA where it has very little carriage).  At the same time, the channel has avoided investing more into its own website to handle video.  A wise move now, but if it hopes to compete better with the BBCs and CNNs of the world, its site will need video capabilities. 

After about a year of allowing site visitors to comment on any story, The Sacramento Bee in California is reworking its commenting policy. 

At first the paper allowed commenters to hide behind pseudonyms.  However, to a few people's surprise, this freed some commenters to earn the rather mild title from staffers of "provocateur" as they slung vitriol of all types at those who disagreed with them. Some site participants stopped participating out of annoyance and disgust.

To counter the provocateurs, the Bee will soon require all commenters to user their real name on the site.  While, as ombudsman Aramando Acuna notes, this will likely lead to fewer comments, many readers support stripping anonymity away from commenters.  Further, the paper hopes that this policy will lessen the need for it to monitor and approve or reject every comment before it is publicly posted.

Hopefully, this will work.  Let's also hope that no one will hijack another person's name and spew vitriol on the site to disgrace a their reputation.  Identity thieves don't need credit card numbers, addresses, and social security numbers to harm another's life.

Yeah, you can never win, but for everyone's sake, let's hope that policies like those that The Sacramento Bee is implementing will succeed.

We currently have two positions available in our Washington, DC office.

1. Production Manager
2. Part-time Accountant

A full description for each position is available after the jump.

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I’m someone that is eager to try out the latest Web 2.0 tools, be it Twitter, Powcne, Jaiku, etc. One of my frustrations is that I have to essentially start over every time I create an account on one of these things. I have to enter the same profile information over and over, and, more importantly, I have to recreate my network on every one of these sites.

It gets old quick and is one of the reasons I personally haven’t embraced social networking to the extent others have. I just don’t have the energy to maintain presences on Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, MySpace, etc.

Tony Macdonnell feels my pain and suggests creating a portable “friends” system using OpenID. Here is the gist of it:

I’d love to see OpenID be able to support some kind of “Friend Confirmation” system that would allow me to submit my OpenID to a social network like Pownce (which I am currently going though the “Friend Finding Headache” with), and have it automatically add all my friends that are members of that application. It would be amazing if applications could also add new friends of mine back to my OpenID as well. With this I could traverse all the brilliant applications in the Web 2.0 world taking all my friends along for the ride with me.

I’m not sure this is the exact right solution, but it is certainly on the right track. It is time for your friend’s list to be made portable.

In a link post a few days back, I briefly mentioned MSNBC’s new interactive news game, Newsbreaker. The game was given a positive review by the excellent Influential Marketing Blog. In the link post, I called it pointless and left it at that. I wanted to expand a little and offer two additional thoughts:

(1) Any promotion you launch should be consistent with your brand. As a serious news organization, I’m not sure this game really projects the image MSNBC wants to project. By presenting your news in this way, it seems to me that you kind of trivialize the stories you write. You cheapen the news a little bit.

I also think the time spent developing this game could have been better spent building other, more community oriented features.

(2) Even if you think doing a game is a great idea, for these things to work the game has to be really fun if it is going to get passed around. This one isn’t, in my opinion. And I’m not afraid to waste a little time on a Flash game either.

What do you think? Am I off base?