Kiesow 7.0

What is it about new toys?

My flight back from Las Vegas this afternoon (Southwest 1159) was on one of the airline’s few planes that have WiFi hotspots. Apparently they are still testing out the system and it was free.

So – having a new iPhone, 5.5 hours of flight time and free Wifi – of course I had to check it out. First up was Qik:

http://qik.com/video/1880919

Not too thrilling – but my son did get to watch the live video for a while which was fun.

I also tested out Skype- which worked like a charm on my end – though Annette could not hear much over the engine noise. Need a noise-canceling mic apparently.

The VPN connection into my office network was no problem. More fun was the SimplifyMedia app for the iPhone – which let me stream my home iTunes library for awhile – till I decided to save my battery I can imagine the Slingbox app would be pretty cool as well.

In the end I spent a fair amount of time watching our flight progress on FlightExplorer.com mostly just to watch the weather we were routing around.

And of course, I had time to write a blog post…

I sent a note out over Twitter earlier today trying to gather some additional responses to a Web Tools Survey I am working on: Doing a survey of news Web sites – what open-source and free tools and services do you use: http://bit.ly/oju #journ

Typical enough – but what was interesting was watching the traffic (via bit.ly):

I have noted on the chart the timing of each re-tweet (red) and, perhaps more importantly, the actual conversions of clicks to survey responses (green). In the first hour the survey received five re-tweets, 110 referrals from Twitter, and four people actually completed the survey.

You can check out the raw data here http://bit.ly/info/oju

A bunch of new Twitter accounts popped up in our newsroom recently so I put together a quick list of resources for people just starting out.  I use all or most of these services:

Track your growth
http://twittercounter.com

Get your stats
http://tweetstats.com

Get recommendations for who you should be following
http://www.mrtweet.net

Get notified when people stop following
http://twitterless.com

Find out how influential you are
http://twitter.grader.com

Look for connections among your followers
http://www.tweetwheel.com

A live map based display of everyone
http://twittervision.com

Find more friends
http://whoshouldifollow.com

Search Twitter
http://search.twitter.com

Make shortcuts for URLS (and track the clicks)
http://bit.ly

Hint: at the time it probably had something to do with telling stories.

This comes to mind as I spent the week moving the paper’s blogs from the LifeType platform to WordPress Multiple User (WPMU) the same platform that powers wordpress.com. The project was a whole lot of fun as we had to figure a way to export all of the users, posts and comments from 20 blogs. Did I mention that LifeType does not include a simple export feature?  In the end we found a sample script that sort of worked and had a freelance developer customize it to go Lifetype-to-WPMU. It still involved a fair amount of exporting and importing SQL files, but the heavy lifting was all scripted as part of the WordPress import feature.

The nail in the coffin on the project was trying to redirect the correct URLs for every blog and post from old to new. Considering that our Lifetype setup was fond of underscores and SEO and WP dictate that hyphens are preferred, some mod_rewrite was called for.

Not being a developer and not knowing much about mod_rewrite – it took me about 12 hours to finally find a combination that worked. So – this is why I am in journalism now – finding solutions, learning new things, and telling stories.

Here is the code – it is the “good enough” solution. But, any programmer would probably tell you it could have been solved in about half the lines:

#
# Rewrite old permalinks to new location
# FROM: /web_notes/2008/07/28/more_on_comments/
# TO: /webnotes/2008/07/28/more-on-comments/
#
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5-$6-$7-$8-$9 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5-$6-$7-$8 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5-$6-$7 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5-$6 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/$1/$2-$3-$4-$5 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/$1/$2-$3-$4 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule (.*)/(.*)_(.*)$ http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/$1/$2-$3 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(((.*)_(.*))(?!wp-b))/(dddd/dd/dd)/(.*)   http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/$3$4/$5/$6 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(((.*)_(.*))(?!wp-b))/ http://blogs.nashuatelegraph.com/$3$4/ [R=301,L]

Wow – comments seem to be a popular topic around the old Journo-blogosphere this week.

It started with a radio piece on NPR: On the Media: Comments on Comments

It got kick-started by Jeff Jarvis: Comments on comments on comments

Kevin Anderson followed up with a post reviewing the whole thing: On the Media and Comments on Comments

And of course it spilled over to blogs and forums and Twitter and Google Reader and Friendfeed and ad infinitum. Hey, the medium IS the message. Wow.

By coincidence – we changed our commenting policy on Monday. Changed it slightly. Our approach has always been to start with the most open system possible and then gradually adjust ‘as the situation on the ground’ dictates.

We have been using Disqus.com to host our comments for about six months. Based on the feature set they offer we have gone with a hybrid approach to moderation. If you are a registered user, (with a verified email address) you can post directly, automatically, immediately, without moderation and without delay directly to any story on our Web site. If you are unverified, you can post but your comment gets put in a moderation queue awaiting review.

Not surprisingly we have very little trouble with registered users. Also not surprisingly it is the unregistered (unverified) commenters who try to spam the site with obscene, racist and libelous comments, not to mention the dedicated collection of sock-puppets we have attracted.

Disqus also has some reputation management tools and a ‘report offensive content’ button – but I think the simple act of verifying an email has been the strongest deterrent to bad behavior. Keep in mind, we do not require real names – only that if you pick a screen name you stick to it.

So after six months of this system, our biggest problem has been that the volume of comments makes it difficult for us to keep up on the average day. We have had an informal policy of reviewing and approving comments whenever we could. So, it could be three times a day, or three times an hour, depending. Unfortunately, as policies go that one is not very scalable or sustainable.

So, in the new policy announced yesterday – we are going to start moderating unverified comments twice daily. This will greatly reduce the stress on the approval system in the office, but hopefully it will also encourage readers to actually go and register for an account.

We can only hope that requiring commenters to be the owner of a working email account is not too high a barrier to participation.

Why Newspapers shouldn’t allow comments

In which the writer pulls memorable comments from the NYT site such as this as proof of her thesis:

“if he wasn’t a reporter for the new york times, would we be reading this?”

“Monetizing your shameful past is disgusting. Haven’t you harmed your loved ones enough for one lifetime?”

I totally agree. Newspapers are allowing far too much conversation. And though only 5% of it is trash – that outweighs the other 95%. In fact – on that basis I now believe that because of this one ill-informed column newspapers (and Web sites) should not allow columnists. It just isn’t worth it!

So – finally had a day or two to spend working on the site again. Nothing fancy, just a basic WP install with a template I have been hacking around with.

Most fun – I added a blogroll on steroids at the bottom. I am dynamically publishing the names of all the people I follow on the various social sites. The list shows just their names – if you hover you get what ever piece of info they have most recently updated on the respective sites.

Right now I have Friendfeed, Delicious, LinkedIn, Facebook, plus a regular Blogroll I still need to add a number of people to. I would have Twitter in there is their darn API was working tonight.

There are still some CSS tweaks to make, nav items to add and so on – but pretty happy so far.