Monique Van Dusseldorp posting on the Poynter Institute website writes about the Great Firewall of China project.

The site purports to view any URL through a server hosted inside the People’s Republic and to return information regarding whether your site is blocked or not. Interesting. According to the site, Secong Goose is banned, but my family site is not. If so, it is likely due to keywords (like newspapers and media) or the discussion of Drupal and open publishing technologies.

Though I’m not sure why the Goose would lead to Chinese sedition, I suppose that I’m proud to be banned.

See the original item at Poynter’s E-Media Tidbits.

The new Placeblogger site launched today, the product of Lisa Williams of H20Town. Built on Drupal by the folks at Bryght, the first cut looks very Web 2.0 (down to the shiny buttons).

The site aggregates blogs (natch) that are about specific places. So, for example, the Goose doesn’t count because it isn’t about a location. But Bluffton Today does, and I think SavannahNow does, too, though the site only indexes one blog from SavannahNow, Scott Larson’s The City Unfiltered.

Here’s Lisa’s explaination:

A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time.
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution.
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism.
It’s about the lived experience of a place.
…
Placeblogs spring from a fiercely non-generic America that’s not about big-box retailers or the type of polarizing discussion about politics, culture, and the economy that’s the product of journalism that happens at the 30,000 foot level.

That seems a bit heavy-handed to me, but it captures the spirit of the movement quite well. As usual, Jay Rosen (who’s on the advisory board) has more details.

Aggregation is an idea that we’ve toyed with, and Drupal makes it very easy to accomplish.

One complaint: I’d like to see aggregate pages for states and regions that include the X most recent posts. Currently, to read posts you have to go to a specific blog page.

The framework idea is sound, though, and this is the type of thing that more people will use if they continue to turn away from newspapers that aren’t local.

Bernard Moon sent me word of the GoingOn launch.  It’s a social network platform built on Drupal 4.7.  They’ve done some interesting work.

This is a cross-post test to see if this post makes it to my ‘real’ blog.

– Update –

Not bad.  Three errors:

1) The URL above did not transfer to my WordPress blog.  It seems that <a> is not an allowed tag.  Links only work if you use the Rich-text editor.  I hate that.

2) The tags below didn’t transfer either.  It posted as MISC.

3) And this is a deal-breaker.  I’ve updated this post 4 times, so I now have 4 versions of it on my WordPress site.

The original WordPress version

The latest WordPress version

We launched a new, very different FanaticZone site this week. The site was built on top of Drupal 4.7.2 (our first 4.7 install) by two people in under six weeks.

The theory behind FanaticZone is similar to Digg. The site aggregates Sports news from around the web and allows readers to rank stories in a simple voting format.

The site is a test for us, in a number of ways. Primarily because it breaks us free from our traditional publishing businesses. Even more, it marks the first time that we’ve really tried to play nice with the entire Internet. (Steve Yelvington has more to say about this.) Newspaper-run web sites tend to be dead-ends. They want to be the end-all for the audience, and link to other sites begrudgingly.

FanaticZone is all about the links. It’s using XML and RSS to interface with both Flickr and YouTube. It links to hundreds of other sites. And it allows users to add additional links.

While this isn’t groundbreaking news for the Internet, it is new for us. Plus, since we built it on Drupal, we didn’t really build a Sports aggregator site. We built an experimental framework that will allow us to create additional niche sites.

This project, like some others we’re doing now, was helped along by my time at MooseCamp and Northern Voice.

More to come later. But for now, check it out.

The neverending project is close to ending…

Public beta test now ongoing.

So I added Akismet as part of the WordPress 2.0 upgrade process.

So far, the service has trapped over 200 spam comments.

Very nice.

Wow. Check out this quote:

WHEN men are no longer united among themselves by firm and lasting ties, it is impossible to obtain the co-operation of any great number of them unless you can persuade every man whose help you require that his private interest obliges him voluntarily to unite his exertions to the exertions of all the others. This can be habitually and conveniently effected only by means of a newspaper; nothing but a newspaper can drop the same thought into a thousand minds at the same moment. A newspaper is an adviser that does not require to be sought, but that comes of its own accord and talks to you briefly every day of the common weal, without distracting you from your private affairs.

Emphasis mine. Now remember that this was writen in 1831. How much of it is still true? Or, to make it true, what word(s) must you substitue for “newspaper”?

I just finished a questionaire for Debbie Shing, who I met in Vancouver at Northern Voice.

Towards the end, I was reminded to go look up the following.

In order that an association among a democratic people should have any power, it must be a numerous body. The persons of whom it is composed are therefore scattered over a wide extent, and each of them is detained in the place of his domicile by the narrowness of his income or by the small unremitting exertions by which he earns it. Means must then be found to converse every day without seeing one another, and to take steps in common without having met. Thus hardly any democratic association can do without newspapers.

‘Replace “newspapers” with “community blogs” and you’ve got something,’ I wrote to Debbie.

I would challenge you to tell me who said it, but I’d rather archive this link instead.

Footnote: Love UVA’s online archive project. Just wish it was underway when I was there.

A quick note for later.

Watching CNN this morning and Jeff Jarvis was on Reliable Sources discussing Wal-Mart’s PR campaign targeted towards bloggers. That story doesn’t interest me much, but something Jarvis said is worth keeping.

Roughly quoted, he said: In this Age of Transparency, it’s important that everyone — bloggers and journalists — document and reveal the source(s) of their stories.

I like that title: The Age of Transparency, because I think it gets to the heart of modern media consumption. With the Smoking Gun and the Daily Show as two extremes, we can see how audiences expect full transparency. And we can also see the backlash when transparency is lacjing.

In a footnote to this, CNN also interviewed the authors of the new Sports Illustrated expose on Barry Bonds (taken from their book ‘Game of Shadows’). Reading that article after the Jarvis interview, I am struck by the page-and-a-half sidebar that documents the sources used in the article.

The Age of Transparency indeed.

Well, I’ll be. MDW cleaned up at the Digital Edge awards.

Bluffton Today even nabbed an award for Most Innovative Visitor Participation:

BlufftonToday.com, a true cross-media performer, admirably and ambitiously invites local residents to interact with the use of blogs, photo contributions and respect for the voice of each community member.

Double W00t!