By Andy Carvin (@acarvin)

On October 17-18 in Washington DC we held our first national PublicMediaCamp. I'm proud to say that it completely exceeded my expectations. Held in conjunction with PBS, American University's Center for Social Media and iStrategyLabs, PubCamp brought together more than 250 people from across the country, including bloggers, social media enthusiasts, techies and staff from around three dozen public media stations.

Following the model of BarCamp and PodCamp, PubCamp was organized, as it were, as an unconference. We encouraged participants to brainstorm session ideas on a wiki prior to the camp, but the schedule itself wasn't created until each morning's opening session. Anyone who wanted to lead a session had to announce it to the entire group; volunteers wrote down the session titles and gave them to me for placement on a paper chart mapping out which rooms and time slots were available. If you've never attended an unconference, it might come as a surprise that this method of event planning (or lack thereof) could actually work, but we ended up spawning more than 50 sessions over both days of the camp. Very few of these sessions were your typical conference PowerPoint presentation. in many cases, the session leader would make everyone rearrange the chairs in a circle so everyone could participate equally, which was heartening given the fact we tried to emphasize that attendees should see themselves as full-fledged participants rather than passive audience members.

The sessions themselves covered a range of issues, from strategies for stations to work with local bloggers to mobilizing volunteers during natural disasters. Many of the sessions managed to wrangle someone in the group to serve as official note taker; we've assembled these notes on the PubCamp wiki.

PubCamper John Proffitt put together this video capturing some of the scenes from PubCamp:

Continue reading "Reflections On PublicMediaCamp" >

By Mark Stencel

The NPR News staff is a chatty group, on-air and online -- as thousands of our Twitter followers and Facebook friends already know. Individual NPR journalists, from longtime host Scott Simon to new health blogger Scott Hensley, regularly muse online about their work and other subjects. Even the somewhat technical updates that our Digital Media staff posted on Twitter when we revamped NPR.org in July drew surprising interest and feedback.

Popular social media sites and services are great reporting tools. They help our journalists find and keep in contact with a wide range of sources. They also provide powerful ways to connect with our listeners and users and to share our journalism. But all of us at NPR News need to remember that, as journalists, we are just as responsible and accountable for what we say and do online as we are in other aspects of our lives.

Social media guidelines shared with the news staff on Thursday offer commonsense rules and reminders for those of us here who make use of these communication channels. Summarizing the guidance in an e-mail message, Senior Vice President for News Ellen Weiss urged the staff to "use social media for journalistic purposes and as a way to connect with the audience." Weiss also reminded our journalists -- including the engineering, operations and news administration staffs -- to avoid doing "anything online that will damage your credibility or the credibility of NPR."

Continue reading "Beats and Tweets: Journalistic Guidelines for the Facebook Era" >

By Andy Carvin

Ever since the NPR API came out a year ago, we've toyed around with the idea of inviting local coders to NPR headquarters over pizza and beer to see what kinds of apps and mashups we could come up with together. It seemed like a fun idea, but we realized there was an opportunity for something even more powerful. What if we brought together all sorts of people interested in collaborating with public radio and public TV, to see what we could come up with, including digital tools, citizen journalism and other types community-centered initiatives?

As we talked with our colleagues across the public media system and beyond, it became clear we needed to host a really big camp - a national PublicMediaCamp, that is.

On the weekend of October 17th at American University's campus in Washington DC, NPR, PBS and the AU Center for Social Media will co-host a two-day event that we hope will serve as the kickoff for similar community collaboration events around the country. PublicMediaCamp is going to be organized as an unconference - an event without a rigid, top-down programmatic structure, with the sessions organized by the participants themselves. We're modeling it on other unconferences like Barcamp and Podcamp, which have successfully spawned similar volunteer-driven events around the world, as well as public media unconferences that have been hosted by Minnesota Public Radio and KUSP in Santa Cruz, CA.

All of these unconferences have one thing in common - giving all participants a chance to play a leadership role in the event's success, using tools like wikis and Twitter to plan the event. (Our Twitter hashtag is going to be #PubCamp, to keep it nice and brief.) And that's why we're modeling this event on unconferences. Public broadcasters are well-established pillars within their communities that have inspired a special bond with the public surrounding them. We've been very successful at organizing financial capital campaigns - particularly in the form of pledge drives - but there's still a lot more we can do when it comes to organizing social capital campaigns, in which local volunteers team up with public broadcasters because they've got specific skill sets that can strengthen stations and the community at large. And the only way we can explore the possibilities is to talk to each other, brainstorm and build things together.

Continue reading "PublicMediaCamp: Strengthening Public Broadcasting Through Community Collaboration" >

Zelda the pug, the unofficial mascot of the NPR.org relaunch, made numerous appearances in our @nprtechteam Twitter feed during the rollout. (Callie Neylan / NPR © 2009)

By Andy Carvin, aka @acarvin on Twitter

Yesterday's relaunch of NPR.org was the culmination of a 15-month odyssey involving dozens of NPR staff. We were so eager to roll out the new site, we decided to tweet about the experience. What started as a series of occasional updates, though, became a 12-hour marathon of more than 150 tweets that made it possible for the public to get involved in the rollout process.

Until recently, our use of Twitter to talk about behind-the-scenes tech activities was confined to various NPR Digital Media staff discussing their work on their personal accounts. As the months passed, though, we began to notice how many people on Twitter would inquire about new features or -- let's be honest - problems with the site. So earlier this summer, we set up a new Twitter account, @nprtechteam, to serve as a liaison with the public about the back-end of the Web site.

As we started work on the relaunch yesterday morning, Daniel Jacobson and I began to post tweets talking about various aspects of the rollout, from tech-heavy explanations about each phase of the process ("Date formats are incompatible. Need SET NLS_DATE_FORMAT before executing the script") to behind-the-scenes snapshots capturing the vibe at NPR HQ ("We now have an official NPR.org relaunch mascot. Amy Schriefer brought her pug to work today. She's going straight for the bagels."). Twitter users seemed to appreciate the play-by-play, as the account grew from around 400 users to over 1,000 over the course of the day. (And we're already at 1,200 subscribers today, too.) Much of the feedback we received focused on the transparency of the process, keeping users apprised of each step. This held true for NPR staff as well; given the relative chaos of the launch and the more than 50 people involved, the Twitter account served as a news feed for everyone internally trying to keep tabs on the rollout.

The most important aspect of tweeting the rollout is continuing right now -- getting immediate feedback on what's working and what's not. Unlike some of the other customer service mechanisms we have, Twitter can act like a real-time chat room, allowing us to have a back-and-forth with people to sort out specific problems and document them for the development team in case they require a bug report.

And let's not forget that Twitter can help us out when things aren't going as planned. Soon after our initial rollout at 10:30pm ET, our servers began to experience serious load strain, requiring that we pull back and roll out the new site across the Internet incrementally. Not surprisingly, we started to observe people on Twitter tweeting that they liked the site, while others replied to them saying they couldn't access it. We immediately began to reach out to Twitter users through a number of NPR Twitter accounts, letting them know what was going on and encouraging them to follow @NPRTechTeam for updates. What could have ended up being a lot of confusion within the Twitterverse mitigated itself rather well because we were open about the situation and had a conduit to explain how it would be resolved. Twitter users, meanwhile, retweeted our updates, passing along these status reporters to a wider community of people.

For those of you who didn't follow our Tweet stream in real time last night, you missed quite a ride. You can find a transcript of our tweets below, recorded for posterity. More than a few people commented on how it felt like watching NASA prep for a shuttle launch. While that may be a bit of an exaggeration, we appreciate the sentiment nonetheless. :-)

Continue reading "The NPR.org Relaunch, As Seen On Twitter" >

Earlier today, we upgraded the software we use on NPR.org for commenting and other community tools. The upgrade addresses a number of bugs in the system, but it also includes our first experiment with Facebook Connect.

For those of you who aren't familiar with it, Facebook Connect is a way of letting Facebook users participate in other websites and share their content back to their Facebook accounts. In our first experiment, we've added a "Post this comment to Facebook" option to our comments. When you post a comment on NPR.org and click that option, you'll be able to connect your NPR.org account with your Facebook account and have your NPR.org cross-posted to your Facebook news feed.

For now, that's as far as we've taken it, and it's still not perfect - we've gotten it working in Safari and Firefox, but IE users may not be able to see the "Post this comment to Facebook" checkbox just yet. I'll let you know when that's resolved. Meanwhile, exploring the possibility of expanding this feature so you can cross-post NPR stories to Facebook when you click the "recommen" button, and perhaps even use your Facebook login and password to sign into the NPR Community. We're also exploring OpenID, Open Social and other tools that would allow people to sign into NPR via other websites and share their content more easily.

Anyway, I hope you find our first experiment with Facebook Connect useful. Please let us know what you think.

-- Andy Carvin

In case you haven't seen my tweets about it yet, Inauguration Report is now live. We've managed to create a variety of ways for you to share your inauguration experiences, from text messaging to an iPhone app. CBS News and American University are also helping us promote the project.

We've created a couple of Web pages you'll want to check out. First, visit NPR's Inauguration Report hub for details on how to participate; there's also a widget there, displaying reports as they come in to us. You can also check out InaugurationReport.com, which displays a giant map of all the reports that have been geotagged.

If you're coming to the inauguration or will be involved in events in your community, feel free to start posting dispatches now. We've already gotten hundreds of submissions via Twitter, and other content is coming in as well. We really want to hear from you if you're making your way to DC, whether it's the joy of the road trip or the frustration of traffic gridlock. And on January 20th, we hope to get a ton of submissions, assuming the networks don't come crashing down from the strain.

Special thanks to Dave Troy, Andrew Turner. Nathan Freitas and Sze Wong for their spectacular coding work; David Johnson and Dan Farber for joining us in the editorial collaboration; and Nancy Scola and Allison Fine for taking the lead in pulling together the Vote Report team, which directly lead to the creation of this project. We couldn't have done it without you.

-- Andy Carvin

When we first launched the NPR Community on September 28 of last year, we wondered how long it would take for us to reach 50,000 registered users, and a number of us figured it would take at least six months to reach that goal.

It turns out we were able to do it in four months.

A couple days ago on January 9, we hit the 50,000 mark. And we couldn't have done it with all of you. On behalf of the NPR Social Media Desk, I want to thank all of you who've taken the plunge with us. We're thrilled that we've reached this milestone so quickly.

So here's to reaching 100,000 users! Anyone want to take a guess at when we'll get there?

-- Andy Carvin

The presidential inauguration is less than a month away and the NPR social media desk is kicking it into high-gear to figure out how we can get all of you involved in our inauguration coverage. We're also looking for some techies who can help make it happen.

After our successful VoteReport experiment last month, in which we work with bloggers around the country and invited the public to submit reports on their voting experiences, we're hoping to do something similar for the inauguration. Some of our partners in the VoteReport project, including Dave Troy of Twittervision and mapping guru Andrew Turner, are volunteering again to help re-purpose the VoteReport tools for the inauguration. We've also got some new folks involved, including American University journalism professor David Johnson, and I'm sure others will come on board in the coming days and weeks.

Among the things we've got in mind:

Inauguration '09 citizen journalism iPhone app. Dave and his colleagues created an awesome iPhone app for VoteReport that allowed users to post audio and text reports online and have them plotted on maps, using the iPhone's GPS capability. We're thinking of adding on to this app so that it could also allow users to attach inauguration-related photos or perhaps even short video clips. One idea that was also suggested was to allow an iPhone user to save their reports on their phone and post them later, in case AT&T's data networks are jammed on January 20th. We're also thinking of giving users the ability to submit their email and phone number so NPR reporters can contact them in case we want to use their audio in one of our stories.

Mobcasting. During VoteReport, Dave set up a bank of telephone lines that allowed users to call in and record a voicemail about their voting experiences and have it posted for all to hear online. Given that not everyone participating in inauguration festivities will have iPhones, we want to do what we can to make sure that any phone line could be used by you to file a report from the field.

Twitter and tags. Many of our VoteReport participants used Twitter as their primary method of sending in reports, and we expect that to be the case for the inauguration. We're planning to track all Tweets that are tagged either #dctrip09 (for people road-tripping to DC) or #inaug09 (for Inauguration Day itself). We'll then be able to display all the tweets as they come in. People can also use these tags when they upload to sites like Flickr, YouTube, etc, so we can aggregate that content as well. (Though you shouldn't use the # sign when tagging on Flickr or YouTube - that's just a quirk of tagging on Twitter.) Of course, we'll have to encourage people to use those tags in order for them to work, so we'll need your help getting the word out.

Texting. For people who want to send a text message but don't have Twitter, we hope to have an SMS shortcode available. Fingers crossed.

Maps, maps, maps. Thanks to the hard work of Andrew, Dave and others during VoteReport, we managed to pull together some pretty snazzy maps of all of this user-generated content as it came in. We plan to do the same for the inauguration, particularly in the week leading up to it, so we can track content submissions from people all over the country as they make their way to DC. One thing I'm hoping we can pull off is tapping into all those users with iPhones, since the GPS capability will make it possible to plot each person's route, see how far they've traveled and explore what they've uploaded. For January 20th itself, we're thinking about setting up a hyperlocal map of DC itself, so you can observe everyone's submissions over the course of the day, no matter where they happen to be around the National Mall. This might be the toughest thing to do in the project, particularly for content that's not submitted with GPS metadata. (Using zip codes as geolocators, for example, won't work to well when zoomed in at the street level.) So we may put together a series of DC-specific tags (#ellipse, #washmonument, #lincolnmemorial, #airandspace, etc) to make it easier to identify who's doing what where. Journalism students from American University will also be volunteering to cover the inauguration throughout the city, so we'll be highlighting their activities on the map as well.

Of course, all of this is going to be one big, messy experiment, particularly given the fact that many mobile network providers are forecasting serious congestion and possible outages due to the huge numbers of people using their phones simultaneously. Nonetheless, we think it's worth the effort, given how many people are planning to be involved in the inauguration. There are going to be lots of stories to tell that week, and we want to give you the tools to help share those stories.

Lastly, we'd love your help building this project. We don't have many resources to pull this off, and everyone is volunteering their time to do this. Dave and Andrew are tech geniuses, for sure, but they can't do it alone given the limited time between now and January 20th. So we're looking for some techies who can back them up. Our biggest need is for iPhone app developers who can help them repurpose the VoteReport app and get it in the App Store as soon as possible, so people will be able to install it prior to their roadtrips to DC. We'll also need some Rails, Google Maps and Javascript gurus. If you're interested in helping, please post a comment below and describe what skills you can bring to the table, and we'll be in touch with you soon. If you're on Twitter, you can also send me a note at @acarvin.

As for everyone else reading this post, we'd love your feedback. Does this seem like a worthwhile effort? Is there anything you liked or disliked about VoteReport that we should take into consideration? Are there any specific features or requirements we should try to work into the project? Please let us know what you think.

-- Andy Carvin

I had a long conversation with a colleague of mine about how easily comment threads can go sour. She said every community manager begins with a pleasant view of their online preserve, a view that values democracy, free speech and an open market place of ideas.

Then, after countless episodes of rants, name calling and non sequiturs (it's people like you who will soon have us living in a Nazi wonderland ruled over by a leader who makes Hitler look like a caring social worker), your ideals are dashed.

Where do these meandering, senseless rants come from? Trolls, people who say just about anything to get a rise out of others. Don't get me wrong, I think for the most part, we have a very strong let-the-community-sort-itself-out ethos. We welcome pointed comments from all points of view. We just ask that they also be constructive and substantive.

Trolls, however, are community members without convictions, arguing a point just to see the other person go red. They turn perfectly interesting threads into festering cesspools of resentment.

We've talked about what to do with them. We've stepped in and asked posters to stop breaking the discussion rules. We've blocked scads of comments, and even a few community accounts. Eventually, we came to the obvious conclusion that the only thing that will move this conversation forward is to ask the community to ignore them.

So, here's a new community rule: Do not "feed" the trolls. We encourage community members to report abuse by trolls. But we also ask that you not engage with trolls in the comment threads. Reacting to their provocations is exactly what they want.

If we see you feeding a troll, we will remove both the troll's comments and your responses.

I messaged with a few community members about implementing this new rule and the reaction was mostly positive. But everyone had one question: How do you define a troll?

I think I've already given some definition to the concept of a troll. But community member Peter Wilbur added a bit more: "I think of it," he wrote in an e-mail, "as someone who doesn't engage others in a discussion, who posts irrelevant comments, or who goes off on the same rant no matter the topic."

In some ways, a troll is like the person at the party who's a little too drunk and picks a fight with everyone. He (or she) is the one who makes things so hostile that everyone avoids a gathering as soon as they see him on the guest list.

Our oft-stated principle is that we want the NPR.org community to be home to a civil conversation that avoids insults, vulgarities and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories. We ask for first and last names during the registration process because we want users to remember that behind our funny avatars and strong views are real human beings.

Trolls tend to hide behind the anonymity of the Internet to make community interactions less human. So, from now on, let's ignore them.

-- Eyder Peralta

Some things are predictable. Anyone could have guessed that The Beatles would be among the top-10 favorite bands of the NPR community. (For the record, it's number two, behind Radiohead.)

NPR Community: Most popular music wordle.com

 

But other things are surprising: The science fiction film Blade Runner is the second favorite after the classic romance Casablanca.

These are the things we know after digging through some of the favorites you listed in your NPR.org profiles. Above is a crude tag cloud of the community's favorite music. Below is another based on listed hobbies. (Click on the image to get an enlarged version.)

NPR Community: Most popular hobbies. wordle.com

 

We're learning lots -- the most listed area of expertise? Music. Favorite program? All Things Considered. Favorite book? The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- and after the jump we've compiled two top-10 lists. Did any items on the list surprise you?

-- Eyder Peralta

Continue reading "'Blade Runner' And The Beatles Define The NPR Community" >

Since we launched the NPR Community, we've had more than 27,000 comments posted. The good thing is that the social media desk (made up of myself, Wright Bryan and Andy Carvin) has blocked only a tiny fraction of those.

For the most part, we've been happy with the conversation you all have created; we've learned a lot in the past couple of months, from how a community polices itself to more ordinary things like useful links and amazingly human tales about the toll of war.

Terrell Spencer's comment on Ivan Watson's story about a tumultuous marriage between an Iraqi woman an American serviceman was especially poignant.

He wrote:

I'm an Iraq War vet, and I've recently come out of PTSD. Fallujah was a hell hole. You can't live/fight there and it not mess you up. I'm a loving husband and father, I consider it my duty to sacrifice for my family. I love and respect critters, but 8 months ago I snapped at the world's loyalest dog for not coming. I beat her, pummeling her with my fists, screaming while choking her, then threw her off the porch. I was completely out of control. I never hit my wife, but I shamefully created a home where she and my son lived on edge. I'm better now, I've dealt with what happened over there. Why am I spilling all this? Because these people need help. They're hurt and messed up. These people are ashamed, and hurting. They should be rebuilt - not abandoned and condemned.

The comment was left amidst a hostile conversation. The gist of it is that, after struggling economically, the Iraqi woman in the story had turned to stripping to support her family in the United States. A lot of the comments were disconcerting in their judgment.

One of the mild ones came from Jan Shields, who wrote, "Where is the dignity and discipline that we associate with our veterans of war? Shameful. shameful, shameful!"

A couple of producers asked that the comment thread be closed for the story and we considered that seriously, but, then, out of the steam of the conversation emerged Spencer's earnest plea.

Part of the reason we launched community tools on the site was to open NPR to the outside but another big reason was that we thought the wisdom of the many would better inform the stories on NPR.

To see so little empathy given to such a human, flawed family was, to be honest, disheartening. Part of my greatest hope for a community like this is that we go back and forth civilly on a diversity of opinions and come to find some understanding.

But I guess the lesson learned with Spencer's comment is that sometimes to come to that understanding, we need a little tousling, that sometimes out of dissonance emerges harmony.

Next Time: A lighter fare: We look at the NPR Community's top favorites.
The Time After Next: We consider two new discussion rules.

-- Eyder Peralta

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

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?" >

There is something new on NPR.org today.

Starting now, it will be easier for you to talk to us, for us to talk to you and for you all to talk to each other. We are making it possible for anyone who registers with us to comment on a story and to create a profile page where many interesting things can happen. We are providing a forum for infinite conversations on NPR.org. Our hopes are high. We hope the conversations will be smart and generous of spirit. We hope the adventure is exciting, fun, helpful and informative. This is important for the NPR community.

That last phrase -- "important for the NPR community" -- is not phony baloney corporate rhetoric, I promise.

The NPR community is a real thing; it is made up of the people who work here, the people who work at member stations, the people who listen to NPR on the radio, the people who use NPR.org and the people who support NPR. And many in that community think of ourselves as "NPR people." Few other American news organizations inspire such allegiance, have a real community and have "people." NPR does and it is vitally important to our health and growth to be able to talk to each other more and more openly.

NPR is late to this game, to be blunt. Many big news operations have had open comments and other "social media" functions for quite awhile. Some of you are grizzled veterans of Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and online news commenting; for some this will be new. NPR has been cautious because we want to do it right; we want the comments and the conversations to be useful, friendly and civil; we want NPR employees to participate and talk about their work. We needed the right tools and the right philosophy to come together. Now it has.

NPR is a non-profit. We are not launching the project to get more "hits" that will make more money. We are doing it because it is the respectful thing to do for the NPR community. We expect to get story ideas, tips, insights into the world we cover, tough criticism and even the occasional compliment. We want to share more of the news we gather and the stories we tell with you. And we want to do all this in the NPR style -- with both dignity and self-deprecating lightness.

We won't hit the social media ball out of the park on the first swing. But we encourage you to create a profile and let us know what you like and don't like. We apologize in advance for any bugs you encounter. Also be sure to take a look at some of the more specific rules of the road. And if you don't like to do this stuff in public, here's my e-mail: editorial.director@npr.org.

--Dick Meyer

Over the last year or so, NPR has done a number of projects related to online communities and social networks, from Facebook to Flickr to Twitter. We'll continue to push further into services like these in a variety of ways, but we're also getting ready to bring it all back home with the launch of our own set of social networking tools on NPR.org.

Beginning the first week of October, we'll start rolling out a number of new features on the Web site:

User profiles. Visitors to the NPR site will be able to create a profile page for themselves. A profile page will let you upload an avatar, post a short bio and share your interests. This will also allow other users with similar interests to find each other. For example, if you say you're a fan of a particular band, you'll be able to click a link and see all the other people on NPR.org who like them as well. We'll also show you recent stories from the site related to that topic. Users will also be able to "friend" each other and post comments on each other's profile wall. We're also going to encourage NPR journalists and other staff to create their own profiles, so you can interact with them as well.

Discussion threads for all stories. Currently, discussion threads take place only on blogs, but we'll now have the ability to incorporate them in news stories. Each time a comment is posted, you'll be able to see the person's avatar, access their profile page, recommend their comment or even report it if you think it breaks the site's discussion rules. You can also sort the comments for each story by newest, oldest or most recommended. Meanwhile, site editors will follow the discussions to see what's taking place, so we can feature interesting comments either in the story itself, or even on the NPR homepage.

Story recommendations. Along with recommending comments in a given story, users will be able to recommend the story itself, not unlike the way you digg a story on Digg.com. This will let you explore stories on the site based on how often they've been recommended by the community.

Not too long after we roll out these features, we're also planning to launch a set of community tools not unlike groups on Facebook. We'll be able to set up community pages for shows and other NPR activities where users can start conversations in a discussion forum, upload photos and video, post event listings and the like.

We're really excited about rolling out these new features on the Web site. It's the latest step we've taken to open up the ways we interact with the public. NPR community members have always been eager to engage each other - just go to Facebook and take a look at the number of groups that have been created by members of the public. And we're eager to reach out to the public as well, using the Internet to foster new relationships between our journalists and the public. By creating new ways for that interaction to take place, we hope it'll impact the quality and diversity of our journalism in a positive way.

-- Andy Carvin