This morning, we rolled out some new social networking features on the Web site and addressed some bugs as well.

The biggest thing we've done is added a new community-building tool called NPR Groups. We now have the ability to create individual communities on the site that feature their own discussion boards, a group blog, event listings, and galleries for user-generated photos and video. They're not unlike the groups you see available on Facebook and other social networking sites.

With today's release, we've set up groups capability for almost 300 NPR member stations and station networks. You can browse or search the list of stations in our new station group directory. Initially, most stations won't have the new tools activated for their group pages, but you can still friend them by going to their group page and clicking the "join" button on the right side of the page. Stations with group pages each get to decide for themselves whether they'll use the new community tools or not, so not all of your favorite stations will have the full functionalities set up. One example of a station that has just activated the community tools on the site is WDAV Classical Public Radio in Davidson, NC. If you've already listed any favorite stations by editing your account on NPR.org, you'll automatically be added to those groups; they'll also appear on your user profile as well.

The new groups tools aren't just for stations. We're also making them available to NPR shows and journalists, so we can roll out new community spaces for a variety of topics. This will happen over the course of the coming weeks and months; I'll post updates about new groups on the blog.

Meanwhile, today's release addresses several bugs and other fixes, including some that were suggested by blog readers.

• Added text to the NPR.org registration page to clarify that user's full names are displayed in their profiles and comments

• Fixed the bug that prevented users with apostrophes, dashes and other characters in their names can register successfully

• Fixed our blog software so blog posts are displayed properly in various parts of the site in relation to our social networking tools

• Comments written with multiple paragraph no longer appear as one long paragraph

Like I said, I'll post updates as new groups roll out. In the meantime, please feel free to let me know if you have any questions or comments.

-- Andy Carvin

During the presidential debate tonight, I'll be doing an experiment with some of my NPR colleagues. As we did during the VP debate, we're inviting Twitter users to help us fact-check the candidates' statements. So if you hear them say something that seems inaccurate, prove it. Try to track down a primary source that sheds some light on the claim one way or another - a speech transcript, YouTube video, etc - and tweet the URL with the tag #factcheck. We'll then monitor the results and use them as we do our own factchecking on the NPR Vox Politics blog.

Meanwhile, another experiment occurred to me: can you use Twitter as a form of distributed dial-testing during the debate? If you've watched CNN during the previous debates, you may have noticed the dial-test data they display on the screen. A group of people are sitting in a room with a device that has a dial on it. As they hear stuff from the candidates that they like or dislike, they turn the dial to reflect how they feel about it. CNN then averages the dial test results and maps them on the screen.

Imagine if we used Twitter to do the same thing on a mass scale. The simplest way to do it would be to ask users to post tweets with a 1-10 numerical score whenever they have a reaction to a candidate's statement, then tag it with the keyword #dialtest. You could then follow the search results using Twitter's search engine and get a feel for how Twitter users are reacting to the candidates.

Of course, it'd be great if you could do it in a more sophisticated way. For example, I'd love to see some sort of application that could observe the search results for #dialtest and average the numbers included all of the tweets in rapid succession - like every 10-15 seconds - and then retweet the average through another Twitter account. Ideally, you'd want the app to be smart enough to ignore numbers submitted outside of the 1-10 range, and maybe limit the number of tweets from an individual user to a few times a minute so a user can't skew the average. Similarly, I'd love to see the app let users register themselves as supporting a particular candidate or as undecided, so you could follow dial test averages for each category of user type, since the Twitter community probably skews towards Obama supporters.

For tonight, maybe we could just have users tweet something simple, like #dialtest Obama 7.5 if they wanted to give Obama a 7.5 out of 10 for a particular remark, then monitor the search results. I think that's the easiest way to get started. Meanwhile, some of you could also try the new Twitter plotting tool Plodt, which tracks tweets that reference a keyword and assign it a numerical score, placed between asterisks. For example, if you wanted to give McCain an 8.0 for a comment of his, you'd tweet *McCain 8*, with the asterisks included. If you want to try this method, be sure to follow @plodt on Twitter first so they know to track your tweets.

Update: Okay, here's how it's gonna work.

Step 1: Follow @plodt on Twitter.
Step 2: each time you want to rate a candidate's statement, format your tweet like these examples:

#dialtest *McCain 7.5* Good answer on Iran

or

#dialtest *Obama 7.0* Like what he said re: bailout

By including #dialtest in your tweets, everyone will able to follow along using this Twitter search page. And for those of you who are more visual, the tweets will be plotted on a graph using Plodt.com. The graph will only accept your tweet if you follow @plodt on Twitter and surround your ratings with asterisks, like the examples above.

You should now be able to access the Plodt Web site. And like I said, you'll need to follow @plodt on Twitter for your tweets to be processed, though.

Anyway, this is all just a nutty little experiment, so please take the results with a grain of salt. In the meantime, I'm reserving @dialtest on Twitter, just in case.

-- Andy Carvin, aka acarvin on Twitter

As you probably have seen by now, we rolled out several new community tools on the NPR Web site this week, including user profiles and discussion threads for all of our stories. The feedback so far has been very positive, and a number of you have shared some great suggestions on how we can fine-tune these tools. I thought I'd recap some of the highlights and offer some feedback of my own.

Continue reading "How Can We Improve Our Social Networking Tools?" >