The hate-hate relationship between news organizations and commenters on their Web sites may be improving, thanks to smart journalists who see the value of engaging their users in discussion on line and are willing to develop strategies to make the conversation better for everyone.

Jack Lail, Director of News Innovation of the Knoxville News Sentinel, exemplifies that attitude. He shared his news organization’s approach to comments at a Webinar at Poynter’s News University Thursday.

The key, Lail said, is to get users involved in moderating the discussion.

“It starts with the users. We asked them to help us moderate what they found unacceptable on the site. We needs the ones who are commenting as wall as those who aren’t commenting to help us keep the conversation healthy.”

Lail outlined five steps to improving comments on knoxnews.com:
1. Give users tools to help manage the conversation. Knoxnews.com’s redesign this summer gave community members the ability for community to take down comments or ban users subject to approval by the staff.
2. Recognize mitigating factors. For example, misinformation in comments threads tends to be corrected pretty quickly by other users, Lail said.
3. Develop a strategic understanding.Underscore the value of comments to the news organization and use issues that arise as a springboard to conversation on best practices.
4.Put technology in service of goals.In addition to enabling users to flag inappropriate comments, knoxnews.com allows users to hide comments, staff monitor comments from newly registered commenters and freezes comment threads or disallows them on certain stories. Knoxnews uses profanity filers. Editors and reporters can use RSS feeds to monitor comments.
5. Train the staff. The newsroom recently expanded the responsibity for monitoring comments to virtually every editor on the staff and reporters are encouraged to be present in comments on their stories—responding to commenter questions, for example. Lail said the newsroom has held brown bags to discuss issues around managing comments, including when to take them down or ban users, “terms of engagement” with users, and setting and enforcing boundaries of civil debate.

Lail’s organization focused on comments as part of the Associated Press Managing Editors Credibility Project and NewsU will present five more Webinars on APME credibility project. I was particularly interested in attending because civic engagement with news is a focus of my fellowship at the Reynolds Journalism Institute.

Lail said Knoxnews.com decided to look at comments after being inundated with racist and other unacceptable comments on stories about a horrific murder case in which the victims were white and the suspects black. In May, the news organization hosted a community forum that included the mother of one of the murder victims. As a result of that session, Knoxnews.com decided to “be more ruthless” about taking down offensive comments and banning trolls (users who live to pick fights) quickly.

Lail’s message—that comments can be kept civil and that they must be part of any news organization’s agenda—is an important one. The digital public isn’t going to be leaving the civic table any time soon. The real question is whether journalists and news organizations will play host to the public or it will find engagement elsewhere.

Here’s an ambitious formula for a new kind of news site: “Combine investigative reporting with online tools to empower citizens to discover their own opportunities for direct action and to publicly deliberate on finding solutions to community problems.”

That’s Wendy Norris talking about her just-launched Western Citizen news site that will cover culture, politics, the environment, health care and economic issues across the Rocky Mountain States.

Her motivation: She just got tired of watching television broadcasts or reading newspaper stories that didn’t give her any way to take action on issues she cared about. “I would watch on TV and all I could do was throw a sock at the television set. They never said what else I could do. I want to bridge that gap.”

Norris agenda is simple:
- Tell the truth
- Promote action, context and relevancy
- Demand transparency

Norris sees a role for her site in the Rockies, where many of the issues she’s covering interconnect across the states and many solutions come from interstate discussions and compacts at state and local levels that play out well below the radar of the average citizen. Norris wants to give more citizens access to that information via the Web and, down the road, mobile.

“In the West, the land mass is so enormous. It’s hard to get people together.” Norris also hopes to develop tools that enable citizens to interact around information and engage in debate in more meaningful ways than throwing a sock at the TV.

Right now, the site features a news feed aggregating stories from around the region (Norris notes that many dailies and weeklies in the Rockies do not have Web sites, only PDF e-editions) and a blog by Norris highlighting important stories. She has incorporated Apture into the site to offer users context and “help them explore the breadth of an issue.”

She’s working on a hybrid business model: News gathering will be non-profit and she will seek grants and donations to pay for beats. She’ll form a separate business to create applications for citizen engagement and find other commercial revenue. In addition to offering news content, she hopes to develop resources to teach citizens how to blog, crowdsource and otherwise make their voices heard.

She is bootstrapping her site and has spent only a few hundred dollars incorporating her business and building the (she did her own coding) while supporting herself with freelance assignments for national publications.

I met Norris in May, Norris when she was a fellow at Knight Digital Media Center’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp, funded by the Knight Foundation. Now, as a fellow at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism, I’m eager to see how she develops the civic engagement aspects of her site.

Norris’ wasn’t the only site that launched Tuesday. There’s a lot to like about the just-launched non-profit Texas Tribune news Web site, which also has Knight Foundation support. I suggest you check out the site and this post on Nieman Journalism Lab for an overview.

I want to focus on one feature, TribWire, which you will find on the right hand column of the home page. This is an aggregation feed of important stories from other publications and sources, selected by the staff of the Tribune. If you don’t have a feature like this on your news site, you are missing a chance to provide a great service to readers and help establish your site as a place to get all the important news on your franchise topics.

I really enjoyed the post “Everything I Needed to Know About Social Media I Learned From Spider-Man.” After you read it, here’s the look at the lessons (bold face) with my thoughts (regular type):
1. Listen first. How many news organizations are using social media to push out your headlines but neglecting to find interesting community conversations that might inform news coverage? Success on social media requires abandoning the traditional idea of one-way media (from news organization to the public) and finding ways to tap into conversations and learn from them without intruding.
2. Be real. This remains a tough one for traditional journalists who came up on a notion that objectivity was a primary goal. Being “objective” often meant being detached and hiding personal perspectives (different from partisan opinion). Authenticity is a key requirement on social media. That doesn’t necessarily mean taking sides. It does mean being forthcoming about views and connections that underlie how you approach a story or issue.
3. Engage your audience through dialogue. For journalists, this means reconsidering your role as an information provider by adding the role of information facilitator. As I’ve said before, few of us who entered journalism in the last century knew much about participating in, even fostering conversation. Our job was to get the quote and write it up. But the Internet makes the playing field more level. Your users, or community, have something to add and journalists need to learn to hear them.
4. Involve your audience and use their feedback to improve your product. The days of building the perfect project (remember those print redesigns that took a year or more?) are over. Don’t wait, iterate. Assume your users will show you how to make your project better.
5. Build a community.Take some of that great effort that goes into creating quality craft and invest it in fostering conversation and community. Ultimately, it will make your journalism better because you’ll know more about the community you serve and what it needs from you. And you’ll strengthen you brand where it matters—on your home turf.
As Sven Larsen, the writer of the post, points out: “... the principles behind Social Media have been around for decades (and we should focus on those principles and not the latest flashy tools that help us put them in to practice).”
These principles are pretty simple. They do require a re-imagining of the role of the journalist and, as a practical matter, re-imagining by newsroom leaders of the priorities for the staff.
In a different post, Kevin Marks explains an emerging role in online community: “The communities that fail, whether dying out from apathy or being overwhelmed by noise, are the ones that don’t have someone there cherishing the conversation, setting the tone, creating a space to speak, and rapidly segregating those intent on damage.”
Who does that in your newsroom? It may seem daunting as resources dwindle. I think it’s necessary. Don’t wait. Iterate.

One topic of discussion this morning at APME‘s annual conference was a study by Toronto Star Public Editor Kathy English about when to make news disappear if there are problems with the content or if someone in the story or affected by the story has a problem with it.

English’s findings:
- Public requests to remove content are becoming increasingly frequent and are likely to increase.
- Many news organizations have policies for when to “unpublish” but there is no industry standard.
- News organizations are highly reluctant to take down content unless there is a compelling legal reason to do so or someone’s life in endangered.
- Reports of minor criminal charges are a significant source of requests to unpublish. Since news organizations frequently do not follow up on such charges (reporting conviction or acquittal), it’s particularly difficult to turn down requests to remove the content. Gatehouse is experimenting with programming police blotter reports to “fall off” their sites six months after publication, English said.
- “Source remorse” (“I didn’t mean to say that.” “I wish I hadn’t said that.”) does not justify unpublishing content.
- Editors surveyed reported that even when they agree to take down stories they don’t really go away. Often the original story will pop up on search rather than an update that corrected misinformation.

Does your news organization deal with this problem? What are your best practices?

By Mary Turck

Training for citizen journalists is a real-world exercise. They work on real stories, not on lessons or exercises. The plan is to publish their stories, not to certify them as having completed a course. Usually (though not always) their work goes up on line as part of the Twin Cities Daily Planet. Based on our successes and failures and continuing work-in-progress, I offer these guidelines for training citizen journalists:

1) Begin with the basics,  No matter how smart someone is, and how well plugged in to their community, they may forget basics - such as the 5Ws or the importance of spelling someone’s name correctly, or just spelling correctly.

We have created twenty very short lessons on topics ranging from focusing a story to transparency to best practices for quotations and paraphrases. We use these in regular writers’ groups and also as resources for writers who need to work on a specific issue.  Our Resources for Citizen Journalists page lists other places that writers can go to find help, including the Knight Citizen News Network and Poynter Online.

2) Show, don’t tell. The writing workshop is the best tool for citizen journalist training. At the Twin Cities Daily Planet, we offer a wide variety of classes, but the Monday writers’ groups are the best because they include time to workshop articles-in-progress.

Current and prospective writers are invited to come, whether or not they have an article to bring. Pens in hand, the group reads through and marks up one story, and then talks about it. After discussion, all of the marked-up copies go back to the writer, and we launch into the next article.

With four or five or six people intently analyzing each article, the lucky writer gets feedback on everything from commas to content. Participants often disagree with one another and with me about what works best. The end result: lots of affirmation, and lots of suggestions for additions and changes, some of which will make the story stronger and the next effort easier.

3) Power of positive feedback. Whether in the writers’ group or in emails or in one-to-one discussions of articles, starting with a little sugar makes the medicine go down a lot easier. I try to:
* talk about the interesting story idea before pointing out the lack of organization;
* point out the really good quote before launching into the punctuation lesson;
* praise the writer’s familiarity with the subject matter or neighborhood politics before pruning the excess verbiage.

4) Rewards and reinforcement. Fifteen dollars is not much money, but it motivated our citizen journalists to attend a two-hour training session.  The payment said we valued their time and, despite our small-to-nonexistent training budget, wanted them to know it.
Other rewards:
* Reporters’ notebooks—the long, narrow, spiral-bound kind that are relatively expensive as notebooks, but really make you feel like a reporter. Print up a page or two of stickers with your publication or project name and logo, and slap one on the front of each notebook.
* A writer’s web page, with a photo, a short bio and links to published stories. Our writers and interns love these!
* Business cards, with generic identification of your publication or project. When a cop or a video store owner asks, suspiciously, who the writer is and why they want answers to questions, a business card provides instant, if limited, credibility.
* Press credentials serve a similar purpose. This can be as simple as a printed card with information on your publication or project, the writer’s name and identifying information (“freelance reporter, citizen journalist, education reporter”). Check the rules and customs about press credentials in your area. 

5) Constant contact. Every phone call, every email, every text message is important. Sometimes all I can say is, “I’m sorry, but I have been so swamped with work that I haven’t had a chance to read your article yet. I promise that I will get to it tomorrow (or over the weekend or first thing Monday morning.)”

What’s important here is responding to every contact. That’s a basic way to show respect.

At the Twin Cities Daily Planet, I work with citizen journalists every day. Some of them have journalism training, some have none; some have written for other publications, some have not; some write extraordinarily well, some need help.

In training citizen journalists, there’s often a fairly big gap between what I know and what I do. I run out of time, run out of energy, forget what I should be doing. So writing this blog is more than giving advice to somebody else - it’s also a way of reminding myself what I know I should be doing. 

(Note: Jeremy Iggers, director of the Twin Cities Media Alliance which operates the Twin Cities Daily Planet, participated in KDMC’s News Entrepreneur Boot Camp, funded by the Knight Foundation.)

I took heart from a talk this week by Slate editor David Plotz, who suggested a viable revenue future for his online magazine lies not in its approximately seven million unique visitors but in about 500,000 loyal, engaged users who want quality, long form journalism.

Plotz spoke at the Missouri School of Journalism, where I am a Reynolds Journalism fellow this year. Missouri awarded Slate an Honor Medal this year.

More sophisticated ways of measuring usership and engagement will change focus from mass audience, Plotz believes, and that will make journalism better. Raw numbers create “pressure to produce one kind of story” that will draw hits. New metrics of engagement and behavior offer a “tremendous opportunity for Web journalism to escape the traffic” trap. He believes that will liberate Slate to “make a magazine that recognizes those dedicated readers.”

“Until now we’ve been selling to the mass audience. Now once you have this abiltity to target you can really target your core audience… This creates strong incentive to create durable journalism,” Plotz said. “That one curious reader is worth 50 times the value of the drive-by reader. The person who makes a commitment to your brand, if you’re a quality brand….. if you can get those readers, a smaller set of readers, who come to you three or five or 10 times a week, you don’t have to go after that huge other set of readers.”

So forget celebrity and outrage stories. For Slate, this focus means a commitment to long form journalism such as a recent series on the American dental crisis, which Plotz estimates was read by 400,000 people. Slate has started a “Fresca Fellowship” that requires each reporter and editor to spend a month each year on a long form journalism project. Advertisers have begun to sponsor specific projects and they are paying for themselves, he said.

“Advertisers want to be around some ambitious project more than they want to be around some snarky political column,” Plotz said.

While excited about this new opportunity on the Web, Plotz cautioned Missouri journalism students that they face a career path that will require them to know more than journalism: social media, audio and video production, even some coding and fluency with content management systems. The new journalists may have to fight for time away from breaking news to focus intensely and develop projects.

Plotz thinking about a smaller engaged audience is similar to what could emerge in local news markets as news organizations pay more attention to small, under served advertisers. Serving up big numbers of unengaged users won’t ultimately help these advertisers. Developing loyal, engaged user communities holds more promise.

What do you think? Are mass metrics on the way out in your news organization? What are you measuring as an alternative?

“The Reconstruction of American Journalism” offers a sweeping overview of the forces and developments that are reshaping journalism in the United States today. Unfortunately, the report’s recommendations for fostering public service and accountability journalism fall well short of the impressive build up.

Recommendations:

1. The Internal Revenue Service or Congress should clearly and explicitly authorize any independent news organization substantially devoted to reporting on public affairs to be created as or converted into a nonprofit entity or a Low-profit Limited Liability Corporation serving the public interest, regardless of its mix of financial support, including commercial sponsorship and advertising.

2. Philanthropists, foundations, and community foundations should substantially increase their support for news organizations that have demonstrated a substantial commitment to public affairs and accountability reporting.

3. Public radio and television should be substantially reoriented to provide significant local news reporting in every community served by public stations and their Web sites. This requires urgent action by and reform of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, increased congressional funding and support for public media news reporting,and changes in mission and leadership for many public stations across the country.

4. Universities, both public and private, should become on-going sources of local, state, specialized subject, and accountability news reporting as part of their educational missions.

5. A national Fund for Local News should be created with money the Federal Communications Commission now collects from or could impose on telecom users, television and radio broadcast licensees, or Internet service providers and administered in open competition through state Local News Fund Councils.

6. More should be done—by journalists, nonprofit organizations, and governments—to increase the accessibility and usefulness of public information collected by federal, state, and local governments, to facilitate the gathering and dissemination of public information by citizens, and to expand public recognition of the many sources of relevant reporting.

Some of these things are already happening—foundations are supporting news and information, universities are reporting news, a looser model for a nonprofit news entity is under debate in Congress. All well and good.

But recommendation No. 5—the creation of a fund for local news and state councils to hand out the money -  is troubling on two counts:
1. Imposing new fees to create a Fund for Local News suggests ultimately making consumers pay for news that they now are not willing to pay for. That would make journalism even more popular than ever, right?
2. The state Local News Fund Councils sound unwieldy and open to politicization.

Better a model such as Spot.Us, where members of the public vote with their dollars to fund stories they want to see done.

I have a great deal of respect for both Downie and Schudson. But their recommendation No. 5 sends us down a garden path of wishful thinking when we need to hit the highway of innovating business models for news around the ideas of service and engagement.

I was interested to read NPR’s new guidelines for social media by its journalists and to compare them with guidelines recently put in effect at The Washington Post.

I lamented that the Post cast social media as a minefield, with a litany of “don’ts” and discouraging signals.

Just contrast the opening paragraphs of each organization’s guidelines:

The Post:

“Social networks are communications media, and a part of our everyday lives. They can be valuable tools in gathering and disseminating news and information. They also create some potential hazards we need to recognize. When using social networking tools for reporting or for our personal lives, we must remember that Washington Post journalists are always Washington Post journalists.  The following guidelines apply to all Post journalists, without limitation to the subject matter of their assignments.

“When using social networks such as Facebook, LinkedIn, My Space or Twitter for reporting, we must protect our professional integrity.  Washington Post journalists should identify themselves as such. We must be accurate in our reporting and transparent about our intentions when participating.  We must be concise yet clear when describing who we are and what information we seek.”

Leadership code words: Hazards. Protect professional identity.

NPR:

“Social networking sites, such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have become an integral part of everyday life for millions of people around the world. As NPR grows to serve the audience well beyond the radio, social media is becoming an increasingly important aspect of our interaction and our transparency with our audience and with a variety of communities. Properly used, social networking sites can also be very valuable newsgathering and reporting tools and can speed research and extend a reporter’s contacts, and we encourage our journalists to take advantage of them.

“The line between private and public activity has been blurred by these tools, which is why we are providing guidance now. Information from your Facebook page, your blog entries, and your tweets - even if you intend them to be personal messages to your friends or family - can be easily circulated beyond your intended audience. This content, therefore, represents you and NPR to the outside world as much as a radio story or story for NPR.org does. As in all of your reporting, the NPR Code of Ethics should guide you in your use of social media. You should read and be sure you understand the Code.”

Leadership code words: Increasingly important. Very valuable.

Specific guidelines aside, which leadership message do you think will work best for traditional news organizations that want to encourage journalists to boldly go into social networks?

(This is a revised version of a draft posted earlier. There is new material throughout.)

I spend a lot of time these days talking with local foundations and nonprofit organizations that want to help fill information gaps in their communities. They’re building Web sites designed to engage their communities in news and information (often with funding from the Knight Foundation, which contracts with me to coach these start ups.). These enthusiastic conversations make a heartening counterpoint to the wrenching struggles of established news organizations.

The optimism is not the most important difference, however. The biggest difference is this: Journalists are out to do good journalism. These community start ups put civic engagement first.

At its heart, journalism is about fostering civic engagement by providing news and information that empowers people to act as citizens in a democracy. At least, that’s what we mainstream journalists tell ourselves.

In traditional media, the journalism generally doesn’t look like that. For example, one recent study showed that more than half the coverage of the health care debate focused on political battles and less than 10 percent focused on policy.  That wasn’t exactly a surprise. “We don’t learn,” I wrote recently as I passed the a link to the information along on Twitter. In reply, Jay Rosen nailed it with this admonition: “Face it, @michelemclellan. If 55% of health care coverage is about the politics that’s a statement by our journalists: ‘this is what we do.’ “

Competitiveness, craft imperatives, professional goals and now, the revenue free fall—all important issues— trump the civic. When journalists gather in newsrooms, bars and at conferences, they talk about craft practices, tell war stories, and the shiny bright hopes for a scoop or job stability.

It is the rare conventional journalist - certainly never me in nearly 30 years in newspapers - who walks into the newsroom on any given day and asked “What can I do to engage my community in civic affairs?” “How can I help make the debate go better?” I wonder how journalism, its place in the hearts of citizens, and public debate itself—might be different if journalists had come to work each day with that goal in mind.

This may be changing. As traditional news organizations falter, new practitioners of journalism are emerging: Citizens, foundations and other donors who are experimenting with models of news and information that put civic engagement is front and center as a priority. At the same time, the Web and social media make some forms of civic engagement easier and more accessible—activities like ratings, commenting, earning points for action.

None of this leaves traditional news organizations out in the cold. I’ve championed the idea that big local news organizations partner with community news start ups rather than treating them like more competition. I was thrilled to see that J-Lab, with Knight Foundation funding, is sponsoring several of these partnerships. I think finding the right mix of craft skills and reach of the traditional organization with the energy and fresh approaches of non-professionals will be important to the future media landscape.

All of this brings me to the fellowship I have just begun at the Reynolds Journalism Institute at the Missouri School of Journalism. I’m calling my project “Civic engagement 2.0.”

Journalism must recapture its credibility and relevance if it has any hope of providing value to the public. To do this, it is critical that journalists adopt new practices that foster the civic debate we keep telling the public we are all about. The tools are emerging—social networks in particular can transport news and information that engages people in discussion and problem-solving. News organizations - some led by non-professionals and foundations, social activists, politicians, and even marketers are discovering creative ways to engage people online..

Digital media and emerging citizen-led news and information services promise to promote civic engagement in ways traditional media failed to do. But I think there is an important role that journalists can play and I want to catalog and foster tools and practices to help journalists take part in and add value to civic discussions online. I also want to work with journalists and citizens to create new ways to engage online. I’m convinced that the ability to engage and foster community is a strategy that journalism must pursue for the long term even if it cannot be readily monetized today.

Let’s consider three important traditional roles of journalists and the opportunity to recapture them online:
(Note: This list of roles borrows heavily from my friend and RJI colleague Michael Skoler.)

1. Journalism surfaces issues of public concern. The Web offers journalists the opportunity to tap into conversations where important issues first surface. Pre-Web we used to call these “listening posts” where people gathered informally to discuss their concerns. Journalists rarely spent time in these these places, instead opting to listen more regularly to institutional voices and their framing of the issues.

2. Journalism provides facts and options that give citizens shared knowledge. The Web liberates information from print and enables wider sharing and discussion than ever before. Social networking tools in particular enable people to share information.

3. Journalism informs civic debate and solutions on issues of public concern. This brings it full circle; the journalist surfaces the issue and then helps guide the discussion toward solutions. It is a critical role for a trusted journalist, and one that seems to be slipping away in the 24/7 news cycle, if it ever really was being performed. Accomplishing this will take more then technology, it will require a shift in attitude or at least priorities. Some will complain that what I’m talking about sounds like advocacy journalism. But I am not talking about journalists expounding opinions. I am talking about what Jacqui Banaszynski, a friend and RJI fellow, calls “invested journalism,” which I see as a commitment to helping the community understand issue, see options and find a good path. For this, journalists may need to look to emerging citizen-led news organizations, social activists and even political causes for new tools and rules of engagement.

This all sounds very philosophical. But what I hope to produce are tools and best practices that journalists and other news providers can use to foster civic engagement in digital spaces, whether it’s on their own Web sites, in social spaces or all around the Web. I think much of this already exists and I’d like to help gather practitioners, learn from them and help spread the word.

For now, I have these questions (and I hope you will comment and feel free to make suggestions or ask more questions):
Is this the best way to be looking at this issue?
What best practices exist and who is developing them?
Do some of these practices exist outside journalism? Should I see if they can be adapted?
What is most missing in terms of tools and best practices that can help journalists engage in civic discourse online?

(Jacqui Banaszynski, my friend, fellow RJI fellow and Knight Chair in Editing at the Missouri School of Journalism, brought back from ONA a nice list of items that may be among the next big things for online journalism.)

By Jacqui Banaszynski

The web-hip folks of the Online News Association were an oasis of optimism last weekend in the drought-stricken landscape of newspaper journalism.  ONA members, who celebrated their 10th anniversary at a sold-out conference in San Francisco, don’t seem to fear the future, as so many traditional journalists have come to do.

Not that the future is clear, even for the ONA crowd.  Before we even grasp Web 2.0, it’s being eclipsed by dreams of Web 3.0.  Social media is a “beast still to be understood,” says Facebook designer Lee Byron.  And Twitter has yet to make a profit.

“Trying to pick winners in the next five to 10 years of the media landscape is hard,” says Om Malik, founder of GigaOM Networks. “We don’t know what’s going to stick.”

With those caveats, below are a few forecasts gleaned from ONA, credited to those who made them.  They don’t represent the totality of intelligence at ONA - just the workshops I attended.  Please add any of your own below.  And this important consumer message: These are not rated or handicapped. Anything I once had was invested in newspapers and real estate, so you’re best making your own bets.

1. GoogleWave could be the next, well, Google. Barbara Iverson, a professor at Chicago’s Columbia College and publisher of ChicagoTalks.org says Google’s soon-to-be-released real-time sharing tool is the latest blockbuster in the communications journey that has taken us from phone to Napster to Facebook to Twitter. It will apparently make the hiccup of time spent waiting on Twitter or IMs seem limiting.

2. Facebook Connect got multiple bangs. (FYI, a “bang” is Yahoo-speak for what the rest of us call an exclamation point.) Salon editor Joan Walsh and social media consultant J.D. Lasica both predict it will be a powerful tool to build online communities around your product or message.  Their reasoning: It will lower hurdles to registration by letting people log in to your site directly through their Facebook accounts.  Those users will have real identities, boosting transparency, accountability and civility (and, I expect, making advertisers giddy).  And it will boost chances for viral distribution.

3. Twitter, already the stud of the online world, is taking steroids. Co-founder Evan Williams mentioned three specifics: Twitter lists to let you more easily aggregate and organize the Twitterverse, and send group messages; location information embedded into every tweet; and an as-yet-to-be-defined “reputation system” designed to make tweets more transparent and verifiable.

4. The New York Times is also pumping up its open source software, and inviting readers into the gym.  A document reader already lets readers access original source materials linked to a story.  What’s best, says information architect Elliott Malkin of NYTimes.com is that those documents are wrapped in “a journalistic layer,”  such as a reporter’s explanation or editor’s synthesis.  Future versions will make it easier to sort and read both source documents and the journalistic annotations, Malkin says. But get this wiki-esque twist: readers will be able to add their own observations and questions directly into the document stream. Those comments will be moderated by the Times, but once approved, will no longer be segregated into a comments box.

5. Podcasting is all but dead. “It’s too hard to use, and growth has stopped,” says guru podcaster-turned-Tech TV guy Leo Laporte.

6. This from Lasica, without elaboration: By 2012, 95 percent of content on the Internet will be video.

7. Finally, women rock - and rule.  “Women are ahead of the general population in (Internet) use patterns,” says Lisa Stone, co-founder of BlogHer.  Barely 10 years ago, Stone couldn’t square her single-working-mom life with the widespread sentiment that women would never be a force on the Web.  Now BlogHer - a company run by “three chicks with credit cards” - ranks No. 7 in overall use numbers among all blogs, Stone says. (It trumps Gawker.). BlogHer publishes 2,500 bloggers (and pays them a bit to boot) and reaches 15 million women a month.  Stone cited these stats from a 2009 survey the company commissioned: Of 109 million women in the U.S., 79 million are online. More than half of those use social media at least once a week.  And 85 percent of them have bought something based on the recommendation of a trusted blogger.  They continue to embrace “soft” lifestyle topics (BlogHer started with a handful of parenting blogs), but have what Stone calls an “unbelievable appetite ... for hard news.” Stone credits her traditional newspaper and CNN principles as core to the site’s success: Bloggers have to sign strict editorial guidelines.  Paid editors police the posts for everything from plagiarism to hate speech, and violators are booted.  BlogHer declines disguised marketing, or pay-for-post blogs. As Stone puts it: “You have to separate chocolate and peanut butter, church and state.”