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Michael Cosentino over at the International Herald Tribune's Developer Blog shares some of his thoughts about comment sections on news sites – a topic that we cover in our newspaper study.  In his post titled "How are visitors using comments?" he shares some of the issues that he and his team have mulled over as they upgrade the comment section on their site. 

His post focuses on three main points that are crucial to successful comment sections: location, topic selection, and lead-off questions. 

I personally liked his discussion of the editorial side of managing comments.  On one hand his site wants to present topics that many site visitors would have something to contribute, but just because people would talk about the latest exploits of a celebrity, that doesn't make it suitable for every news site.  On the other hand, a site shouldn't select topics that are so esoteric — like seventh century underwater basket weaving — that most of the visitors would have nothing, nor desire, to say.  Editorial decisions must achieve an interesting balance.

Granted, what works for the IHT will not work for other news sites, but this post is valuable since Cosentino shares several factors to consider when designing community features of a site.

Hat Tip: Kevin Anderson at Strange Attractor

Here at The Bivings Group we like news and Internet sites.  A news site interests us even more. 

The Internet and news sites have changed a lot over the last 10 years, and that's why it is fun to wish the site for BBC News — of the most well known – a happy tenth birthday this week. 

The Beeb is celebrating as well.  Check out its news stories about its first 10 years — it even has pictures of how the homepage looked during major news events.

The conservative blog community RedState recently issued a ban on Ron Paul supporters from “shilling” for their candidate on the site. This led to a very entertaining exchange of arguments about the decision. Against the ban, you’ve got Captain Ed and David All. Defending the decision you’ve got Mike Turk, Lance Dutson and Erick Erickson from Redstate. And then David All and Mike Turk weighed in again.

Seriously. Go read this stuff. Very entertaining.

My take on this is that RedState did the right thing. But I have a different perspective on the matter than most that have commented so far. By banning Ron Paul “shills,” RedState was simply preserving what makes it a great site – it’s community.

I’m an old dude in Internet years. I’ve done my time on various message boards, blogs and community websites. And I’ve seen some of my favorite sites ruined by poor moderation by site runners.

I’ve watched sports boards that I loved devoted to the Texas Longhorns and the San Antonio Spurs go to crap due to poor moderation that allows personal attacks and off topic discussions.

I’ve seen the conversation level on fantastic liberal and conservative blogs devolve to the point of horror due to submissive admins.

I’ve watched how crappy the discussion is on newspaper websites like the Washington Post and USA Today due to lack of oversight.

I’ve watched Ron Paul supporters make any real political discussion on Digg impossible. I’ve seen these same folks hijack threads on this very site.

I can only imagine what a site like RedState is dealing with during an election year.

As an admin at one of these sites you have a responsibility to your community to preserve the level of discourse by providing oversight. If you don’t, you run the risk of alienating the core contributors that made your community site great to begin with. RedState did the right thing.

Yesterday The Bivings Group launched our latest client site Living Conversations, a community-based website for breast cancer survivors. The site encourages survivors to submit their stories via video and the written word as a way of providing strength and support to anyone coping with the disease. We’re happy of the way the site turned out, and to be associated with such a cool organization.

Working on the site also gave us the chance to try out a few things we hadn’t attempted before. Given that, I figured I’d give a little look under the hood and explain how the site was constructed.

The site is built using using the open source Content Management System Drupal. As mentioned previously, we pretty much build all our website these days in Drupal or Wordpress. We chose to use Drupal for this site due to the community features that were required and the varied content types on the site. We also wanted to leave the Living Conversations folks with the ability to quickly expand the functionality on the site should they choose to.

Working from Drupal, we added a great deal of additional functionality to the site through a combination of custom coding and the use of Drupal modules and plugins. Here is the breakdown of the ones we used:

(1) Video Uploading. A central aim of Living Conversations is to get breast cancer survivors to tell their stories via video. This required us to develop a way for users to upload videos to the site and then to display dynamically in various spots on Living Conversations. We did this using a combo of the Video module and a plugin that allows for the uploading of videos to a Blip.tv account. So basically users can upload a video on Living Conversations and it will FTP directly into their Blip account and show up on the site. Cool stuff.

Note that the Video module in Drupal is very easy to use. If you want to use the Blip.tv upload plugin, you are going to need to have some developers around as it is a bit tricky.

(2) Content Rating. The site allows registered users to rate content using a five point start system. This was implemented using Voting API as the backend and Voting to control the methodology used for the rating on the frontend. They work together.

(3) User Profiles. Out of the box, Drupal has a powerful Profile module built in. This allows registered users to create profiles on the site. Administrators to add just about any fields they want to capture to this profile field. We supplemented this with Buddy List, which allows users to add other users as contacts and track their activities on the site.

Those are the big ones. We also used Flag Content and Syndication to add some minor functionality to the site.

Anyway, check out www.livingconversations.com if you get a chance. Let us know what you think in the comments.

A few days ago Jeff Jarvis over at BuzzMachine noticed an ad for a Tag Editor (Editor 2.0?) job at Britain's The Guardian.  Jarvis explained this is exciting since metadata increases the accessibility and utility of a news site to its audience.

This made me think of our newspaper study this year.  Of the top 100 American newspaper, as ranked by circulation, only one — The Plain Dealer in Cleveland — uses tags on its website.  I wonder why so many papers have avoided tagging but admire The Guardian for willing to make the venture using folksonomy (collaborative taxonomy) since it presents both great challenges and utility.

As social media guru and Everything is Miscellaneous author David Weinberger explained during NPR's All Things Considered on June 11, 2007 in a commentary piece "The Value of a Man-Made Mess, on the Internet" that tagging allows one to classify web content in a variety of ways.  For instance, tags like "American," "food," "yummy," and "crust" are all applicable for a picture of an apple pie. 

Thus, through the use of tagging, a news site doesn't have to limit itself to a small set of sections like metro, style, and national; by using tags it can create sections like "Southern California Fires 2007" or not fret having to exclusively place a story about horse race betting in the sports or business section.  Why not both?

Of course, such freedom and a lack of consistency can make it hard to find anything or tie related information together.  However, that's why The Guardian is going to hire someone to manage this full-time.

Mike Shields of MediaWeek reports that CondéNet, the Internet arm of magazine publisher CondéNast, has aggressively used Facebook applications.

The article mentions that in June the company acquired the "What Are You Wearing?" application, which CondéNet executives claim that about 1,000 users are joining each day the over 90,000 others who are revealing their wardrobe on Facebook. 

Further, a few weeks ago, the more festive "What Are You Wearing for Halloween?" application was also launched and currently has about 4,000 users.

While CondéNet hasn't branded either application, it started to display ads from Guess in its application.  That's the great thing about widgets and other applications, companies who develop them can also use them for ad space as well.

One of the most interesting tidbits from this article to me was when CondéNet president Sarah Chubb mentioned that the "What Are You Wearing?" application has been the most viral and fastest growing widget or application that the company has developed over the years. 

I guess deploying an application on a site where people already divulge information helps give these two applications gusto.

Techcrunch has the scoop on an episode of CSI: NY that will take place in part in the virtual world Second Life. Here are the details:

The episode will see Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) entering Second Life to pursue a killer who has killed a Second Life user in a case of virtual stalking gone too far.

CSI:NY fans will be encouraged to join Second Life and investigate the case by following a link on the CBS website. CSI:NY will have three options for CSI-related inworld activities. The first option will allow viewers to walk around virtual New York buildings and visit a CSI lab and play forensic games.

The second option consists of a game called “Murder by Zuiker,” a unique murder plot which can be solved by users finding clues. The 100 people who come closest to solving the murder will win virtual gifts.

The big tie-in gives new users the ability to become CSI investigators, complete with field kit and tools, and are given a chance to interview suspects and to solve the murder featured in the actual CSI:NY episode. The episode itself will apparently end in a cliff-hanger with the solution not revealed until February.

and

Some reports suggest that Second Life could see one million new user signups following the CSI:NY episode going to air, however it will be more interesting to see how many of the new users will stick around.

Reading this I really have to wonder if CSI: NY is getting anything out of this. Cash? This is such a massive promotional opportunity for Second Life that you’d think money has to be changing hands here.

I think this will also be a huge test of whether Second Life is going to become truly part of mainstream America. If massive numbers of people go in and get hooked, this could take the virtual world to the next level. If this promotion doesn’t move the envelop for Second Life very much, it pretty much will confirm what I suspect: Second Life is a niche community that doesn’t have much appeal for the average person.

(1) Will Social Networks Impact the 2008 Election? I think NOT.

Sanford Dickert has a good post about the seeming lack of impact social networks have truly had on the 2008 elections so far. He writes:

When I go to the local mall, county fair, outdoor market – I can often see the ardent supporters of candidates “tabling” in the flow of traffic – holding their campaign literature, sign at the edge of the table, looking for eyes that are ready to learn more about the person running for State Senate, Congress or even President. You and your friends are there, giving each other moral support as the throngs of people walk by – nary paying attention to you, until a person walks up and says, “So….tell me about Senator X.”

Where does this happen on social networks? Can I put up a “table” and engage in a conversation? Where is the flow of people that are milling about that can be “chatted up”? Certainly not on MySpace or many of the other social networks.

And he closes by asking where the “virtual tablers” are:

This is where the campaigns can use their volunteers and give them the power to reach across their own networks and chat up people when they are interested in learning more about the candidate. But, it is not easy to go and “speak” to someone in Facebook since all of the communications are not interrupt-driven (as a face-to-face might be), they are addressed whenever the receiver wants to. How do you get people to accept the interrupts? Usually, that is the sense of presence – of human contact. Once that magic ingredient is “captured” and enabled, then I could see social networks truly engaging people.

Interesting stuff. My thought is that the official campaign presences won’t have much of an impact this cycle – it is the the ad hoc organizations created and managed by supporters that are the potential game changers.

(2) Will Social Features Make Email Sexy Again?

Wall Street Journal story about attempts by email carriers to add social networking features into their products to help compete with Facebook.

(3) Life At

This is a social networking site aimed at allowing people living in apartment buildings to network with each other. What a great idea.

(4) How to Raise $1.8 Million in 3 Days

Ruffini does a deep dive into how Obama recently raised $1.8 million through a single email push. I wonder how much was raised off the initial email from Obama and how much was raised from those peripheral emails sent by supporters to unsuspecting Obama list subscribers.

(5) Is Mint Ready for Your Money?

Lifehacker takes a close look at the white hot money management tool Mint.