The Danger of Outsourcing Interactivity

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. ...

Stripping Commenters of Anonymity

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"...

Making Profiles Portable

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,...

MSNBC Launches Interactive Game

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....

Props to Mother Jones for Its Blog Outreach

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). ...