[Note: this was originally on the cover page of this series; it was split off to add new information.]

Newspapers have sections; magazines have departments; weblogs have neither. All of these publishing forms carry content of interest to readers, yet none use the same name to describe the essential nature of that content.

Two updates in the jurisprudence of free speech online this week help shed light on one of our favorite pastimes, the search for truth. The lawsuit against Wikileaks (that "entity of unknown form" according to the district court) was dropped.

Maybe it's a cruel conspiracy of the makers of WordPress, MovableType, Blogger, et al that make blog archives a disaster of design.

There's a limited market for the Facebook privacy beat, since most problems can be solved by young Zuckerberg flicking a particular switch. After all, one key aspect of a well-designed technical architecture (and Facebook has demonstrated that it is one) is the ability to reconfigure it without much difficulty. And sometimes it's as simple as cleaning up the user interface.

Last month, I sketched out how geotagging could be useful in major emergencies-- such as knowing, should your community be ravished by wildfires, when it is safe to move back (under the presumption that your neighbors have been geotagging their own photos). As such catastrophes don't happen every day, such an idea will take a while to get traction.

When Andrew Rasiej, the co-founder of the Personal Democracy Forum, ran for Public Advocate of New York City in 2005, he campaigned on a novel civic idea: the city should create a service that enabled residents to report potholes using their cameraphones. He even set up the website for it.

Over the last year I'd learned through my work on compliance software about the Global Rules Information Database (now organized under the Object Management Group's Governance Risk & Compliance Roundtable).

The New York Times, like other media publications, faces two major challenges today regarding the relationship with their readers. First, the newspaper needs to give its readers a reason to keep subscribing, as news can well be pulled from anywhere. Second, the readers need their newspaper to not magnify or manufacture reports of any alleged misdeeds.

Here's a brief suggestion how video news archives could better market themselves in a YouTube world. Archive catalogs have, after all, content to license and sell, and a growing number of amateurs (not to mention the next generation of professionals) are seeking to use it.

Let's review the steps to take if one is the subject of online harassment.  How to Respond to Online Harassment is provided by Working to Halt Online Abuse (WHOA) an organization mentioned in the previous section. There are number of helpful steps; we'd just like to review how these would be followed with or without a lawyer-- as well as through PONAR.

This is the first draft of a submission form for PONAR (Protocol for Online Abuse Reporting). The form is the heart of the request; this can drive the design for an XML schema, database schema, and system architecture.

The objective of this form is to be more formal than an email, while being more convenient (i.e., less expensive) than filing a lawsuit. There is already a variety of online legal form services. I do hope to work with legal experts in order to improve its clarity. By example, here is the Craigslist abuse reporting form.

Just as Creative Commons cleverly emphasizes the rights of users (over what appear to be the overly restrictive rights of coyright), so should Comment Management Responsibility ("CommResp") emphasize the rights of the community members. O'Reilly pointed to the blogher Code of Conduct as an exemplary policy (note: I've been nominated as by the blogher co-founder as "bloghim"), but it focuses mostly on the prohibitions.

The Congress Votes Database from the Washington Post tells you how Senators and Representatives have voted.

But wouldn't it be useful to know what their positions are on issues coming up?

In politics, it's the whip who counts the supports before a vote. Hence: Whipster.

Take a look at the amount of effort undertaken by Talking Points Memo and by Porkbusters last August -- incidentally, not regarding a specific vote, but regarding finding out who was the Senator who placed the "secret hold" on a bill (which would have created a public, searchable database on federal grants contracts).

A brief sketch of the ideas going forth for constructive activism. I see three parts:

Guide - aka the "how to" part. Note that questions like "How to start a blog" have many answers already on the web. The questions I'd like to start answering are "How do we get the prolific bloggers on the topic to contribute here and not exclusively on their own blog " One of the challenges in the Free Alaa campaign was that the actual blog was not updated regularly enough, so readed had to hunt around SandMonkey, the Arabist et al for updates.Granted, I expect that next-generation aggregation will be able to handle synchronized postings.

Badges are graphics that bloggers and website publishers representing generally affiliations. Traditionally, they are image references which point to graphic files, such as GIFs.

This describes an exercise in building a constructive media process.

Let's begin by saying that an organization has policies, bylaws, guidelines, position papers which govern the behavior of its members; for this exercise we will use “policies” as the generic term covering all of them. The organization has two main responsibilities: publish the policies, and understand how they are actually being employed by members.

It inevitably follows that in becoming a man of letters-- a title which should encompass both "personal publisher" and "freelance researcher"-- one has to keep in mental shape by going to a conference every now and then to meet and greet. This impulse is checked only by the need to anchor oneself at the home office to actually get some work done. My home office shared my interest in my going to this particular conference, the Gilbane Conference on Content Management, so I ventured to San Francisco for the opportunity to do so.

[This is a letter sent to the Boston Globe in response to the horrid Op-Ed contribution “When Librarians protect terrorists” by Richard L. Cravatts on February 6^th, 2006. I called the paper to see what follow-up they planned on this, but learned nothing. This is obviously much too long to be a letter, now. I've added some links here for your viewing pleasure.]

This essay defines the concept of social data within social media software systems and issues a call for users to recognize its need to be made available for public research.

A decade ago, the term webzine came into vogue simply to mean a web-based magazine. I'd like to breathe new life into it to describe an alternative format to the weblog for online publishing. Whereas the design fundamental of weblog is the reverse-chronological format, the design fundamental of the webzine is separate departments based on the style of the writing. I'm going to describe here how this would be useful for online communities/publishers.

Last month, I wrote that publications, traditional and online, have a primary responsibility to demonstrate that they are responsive to their readers, and that a majority of the questions along these lines should be concerned with how they handle tips. This month Jay Rosen recognized the problem in the midst of a PressThink discussion and spelled out some guidelines for sending in tips (e.g., “Write a post in PressThink's major areas of interest that gets other people talking, and makes an original point or two.”) This is a good start. Here's a longer proposal for how it can be done that meets goals of accountability and fairness.

In the town of Brookline, the cable company had given an ultimatum to customers to convert to digital, and pay extra per month to rent the convertor boxes. This has caused a bit of rancor, as cable television is expensive enough as it is. When everyone has a digital cable box, the cable company will be able to fine-tune each viewer watches; no longer will a subscriber be able to simply hook up to a cable-ready set and watch channels. This could be a cause of deep concern. Or it could be a great opportunity, to finally introduce a real market in television by using à la carte pricing, where users can choose to only pay for the channels they want.