Disemvowelling Internet Trolls

One of the greatest fears that companies or organizations have about starting an on-line community is the troll — a commenter who seems content to spew garbage and threaten unspeakable action against anyone for anything.  They quickly turn a fecund forum into a locale of bile.  No fair!

There are a many ways one can deal with these unscrupulous people,...

Journalism Scholarships for Geeks

Here at The Bivings Group we're fans of Adrian Holovaty; he has developed fascinating on-line database news features for news sites like for The Washington Post.  Today, upon recieving a grant from the Knight Foundation that he'll use to develop an innovative site at EveryBlock that will make local news more useful. ...

Why Journalists Should Blog Independently

Scott Karp at Publishing 2.0 has an interesting post about why journalists should blog independently from their employers (hat tip: Mathew Ingram).  He gives seven reasons:...

Newspaper Blogs: Quantity vs. Quality

In preparation for our newspaper study that will begin in a few weeks, I was poking around the Washington Post and USA Today websites, specifically looking at the blogs offered by the two papers.  I wanted to find a logical way to compare the success of these blog networks.  Having tried using Alexa in some previous newspaper research and being less-than-satisfied with the reliability of the results,...

Personal Democracy Forum: Common Political Experiences

It was great meeting many people who share my interests and passions at the Personal Democracy Forum in New York City last Friday.  Instead of focusing on summarizing sessions or panel discussions, I'll focus on a chat I had with Utah State Representative Steve Urquhart who participated in a panel discussion about voter generated content since he launched Politicopia —...