• Pat Thornton interviewed me for the BeatBlogging podcast.  We talked about ReportingOn, what it could become, and (more important) what it could spawn if there are interested developers out there who want to take the next steps with the codebase.
• Joshua Porter wrote an interesting bit about carefully crafting leaderboards for your social Web app so they reward good behavior, not just any old participation at all.
• At Publish2, we released a WordPress plugin developed by our-intern-is-better-than-your-intern Daniel Bachhuber.  The “link assist” feature is my favorite part.  Matter of fact, I’m using it to write this very blog post right here.
• Chris Brogan, one of the few people who can really call himself a “social media expert” and get away with it, in my mind, shared his personal method and strategy for getting value out of thousands of friends and followers on Twitter.
• I made it onto an Ad Age list of “25 more media people you should follow” on Twitter, and suddenly I have a few hundred more followers, mostly advertising types.

OK, that’s five things. I’ll try to do this often-ish for those of you that don’t see me going on and on sharing links to this sort of thing every day on Twitter, Publish2, FriendFeed, or Google Reader.

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Here’s a bit from the post about one of the challenges I faced in building a backchannel for beat reporters to help each other out:

Twitter is faster than me

Right, so 140-character limits are long-gone in RO 2.0, and the straight question/answer session should (theoretically, at least) make for longer conversations with more depth to them. As has been pointed out more than a few times, Twitter is a good place to start an argument, but a really poor place to finish one. Although I’d hesitate to frame the sort of exploratory, qualitative Q&A that could happen on ReportingOn as “argument” or “debate,” I’d like to believe that highlighting a “good answer” as noted by the person who asked the question will help lead to a permanent archive for reporting resources in a way that Twitter simply doesn’t do.

To put a finer point on it, if I ask a question of my followers on Twitter and I get a great answer, I get it in a stream of replies that are useful to a certain subset of Twitter users at that moment, but fly right by in the stream and never come back unless I pull them out of the flow of Twitter and display them somewhere. At this particular moment in time, Twitter’s search functionality is highly ephemeral in nature, as it starts and stops indexing from time to time, and rarely dips back in the chronology as far as might be useful. So where the quick-answer utility of Twitter stops, the long-term archive of ReportingOn begins.

There are four or five more points of navel-gazing analysis like that over in the post, which I hope you’ll check out.  If nothing else, they should provide a useful roadmap for the next person who tries to build something similar.

Meanwhile, the crew at BeatBlogging interviewed me recently — you can listen in as I answer some questions about ReportingOn 2.0, the launch, development, and what happens next.  The audio file is at the end of that post, or you can hear it in iTunes.

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It’s still the backchannel for your beat, but it’s an absolute re-imagining of the network.

For those of you who haven’t been keeping score, ReportingOn is a project funded by the Knight News Challenge, and it’s a place for journalists of all stripes to find peers with experience dealing with a particular topic, story, or source.

(You can catch up with our progress reports from year one and related concepts at the PBS Idea Lab blog.)

The first time out, I built it to be quite Twitter-esque in the hopes that journalists would use it like Twitter, asking questions of their followers and sharing ideas about stories they were working on.

That didn’t happen organically, or if it was going to, it was going to take years. So, with the help of a professional development and design team, we’ve rebuilt the site from the ground up, framed around the act of asking and answering questions.

There’s no 140-character limit, but what you will find are lots of basic features that make sense in this sort of social network.

You can ‘watch’ users, beats, or a particular question, viewing everything in an activity feed that brings you the latest questions and answers from the journalists, topics, and particular issues you’re interested in.

I think you’ll like it.

And, as the grant year for ReportingOn comes to a close, we’re also making the source code for ReportingOn available here under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 3. You can use that to build your own backchannel question and answer tool for the journalists in your news organization, or even let your readers ask and answer questions.

I want to repeat that and extend it a bit…

Here are four things that could happen next:

1. ReportingOn.com itself is a stunning success, with thousands of journalists asking and answering great questions every day, finding peers and mentors, improving local news by adding context and insight gleaned from others working similar angles on stories in far-flung locales.
2. A media company uses ReportingOn’s open-sourced codebase to build their own internal backchannel, probably on an intranet, or requiring authentication so they can limit it to members of their own organization.
3. A single news organization uses ReportingOn to do the same thing — build an internal backchannel.
4. A single news organization uses ReportingOn’s open-sourced codebase to build a public tool that allows readers, sources, and reporters to ask and answer questions in a sort of open forum.

What else could you do with ReportingOn? Give it a shot, and let us know.

What’s next for 2.01 and beyond? We’ll let the dust settle over the next few days and figure out which additional features we want to build first, then we’ll take a look at our budget and consider the options. Feel free to check out feedback.reportingon.com to get an idea of where we might go next, and add your own ideas, too!

Thanks to everyone who helped get this launch out the door on time and on budget, especially the Lion Burger development and design team, all the friends and colleagues who gave me their input over the last year, those of you that answered my last-minute call for beta testers, and the Knight Foundation staff for supporting the first year of ReportingOn.

So… Any questions?

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The rough details

Next week, I’ll be in Cambridge, Ma. at MIT for the Future of News and Civic Media Conference, including the announcements of the 2009 Knight News Challenge winners.

What I’m psyched for: Hanging out in Barcamp-esque sessions with the brilliant squadron of past and present Knight grantees, with the added salt of supergenius MIT grad students and their professors.  Oh, and I’m planning to pressure at least a couple people into designing mockups or developing prototypes — on the spot, in the hall, or back at the hotel — for some cool idea that starts out as a conversation in a session.  So, beware, if you speak the words “wouldn’t it be cool if…”

Later in June, I’ll be unleashed on the APSE conference in Pittsburgh for an afternoon, where I’ll lead two sessions on networked journalism.  I still like that term, because it gets straight to the point: Use (social) networks as a reporting tool.  I’ll talk about Twitter, share my recommended social media guidelines for reporters, and touch on some tools for collaboration, like Ning, and beatblogging.

What I’m psyched for: Hanging out with sports writers, finding ways to take cheap shots at the Red Sox, showing off how simple it is to get started with lightweight tools to engage your community in conversation.

Meanwhile…

My new gig at Publish2 has kept me extremely busy, and it’s likely that many of you reading this have heard from me about it lately, usually trying to get your newsroom involved in one way or another with the set of tools Publish2 has to offer.  But, I still do get a lot of questions about what we do.  So here’s my entry-level explanation:

1. We build tools to help journalists bring the best of the Web to their community.
2. We build tools to help journalists and their readers collaborate on reporting the news.
3. We build tools to help journalists collaborate with each other, inside their newsroom, across news organizations, even across media companies.

Double meanwhile…

Those of you who have been keeping score (hi Dad!) know that my Knight News Challenge grant for ReportingOn hits the one-year mark — and its end — at the end of June.  The Lion Burger crew has been building all sorts of tasty goodness into what I still like to call Phase 2, and I’m planning to flip the switch on a few things as the clock strikes July 1.

What you can expect: A brand new focus on questions and answers, a new design, some cool UI features, a lot of transparency about the process of building this iteration of the network, and the full KNC-funded codebase as a ripe Django project, open-sourced for anyone and everyone to try out for themselves.

How to find me

Yes, there’s a lot going on, not to mention the awesome stuff the two-year-old does these days, but I’m still pretty easy to find.

• I’m @ryansholin on Twitter.
• I’m always on IM as ryansholin on Google, AIM, and sometimes even Skype if you’re lucky.
• Questions about Publish2? Hit me at ryan@publish2.com and I’ve got answers.

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As of Monday, April 6, 2009, I’m finished with my M.S. in Mass Communications at SJSU’s School of Journalism & Mass Communications, after turning in my project report and presenting my findings to the department and my peers in the program.

ReportingOn, my Knight News Challenge project, did double duty as my Master’s project, and the scope I presented in my report covers the first iteration of ReportingOn, through Feb. 1, 2009 or so, when the development of the next version began.

When I have some time (ha!), I’ll put a screencast equivalent of Monday night’s presentation up here, although it will be harder to get across all the good and important questions that the faculty and students asked.

Congratulations to all my friends and peers at SJSU who presented their research on Monday, and of course, to all my friends from MCOM 210, 250, 270, 290, and 295 — you know who you are.

Meanwhile, development of the next phase of ReportingOn continues.  I’ll have more news about it soon.

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Well, not what it’s going to *look* like exactly, but how it’s going to be framed.

Here’s a snippet:

“…the goal was always to give journalists — whether they’re a neighborhood blogger or the Baghdad bureau chief at the Washington Post — a place to ask questions about what they’re reporting on.

The shift that we’re making is a move from asking ‘What are you reporting on?’ to asking ‘What do you need to know about what you’re reporting on?‘

That’s where influences like Stack Overflow come into play. What’s the best way to organize and surface questions from journalists about a given topic?”

Check it out, and let me know if you think we’re on the right track.  Things are really starting to come together, and some of you should start to hear from me privately soon, as I nose around for newsrooms and neighborhood bloggers to test out Phase 2.

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My Knight News Challenge-funded project to connect journalists on the same topical beat with their peers launched on October 1.  I continued development work on it through the month of October, and then was completely tackled by a pack of wild bears known as my day job, life at home, and a need for some brief moments of sanity in between the rest.

Head over to IdeaLab to read about where my head’s at right now when it comes to this project, and what I’m planning to do next.  Feel free to beat me up about it over there.

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Plus, there’s a bit about the feature inspiration I picked up yesterday at blip.fm.

The evolving list of features I intend to add to ReportingOn is over on at blog.reportingon.com.  Check it out and let me know what you want to see happen there next.

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The most noticeable thing about ReportingOn so far is the strong Spanish- and Portugeuse-speaking turnout.  Seriously, North America, where are y’all at?

The awesomeness that is the Spanish-speaking media blogosphere has been kind to me so far, though.  Yesterday, Pablo Mancini, who works at the beautiful El Comercio in Peru, interviewed me by e-mail.

I’ve posted the English version at IdeaLab. Check it out:

Q: It seems there are quite a few non-US journalists, several of them from South America, among the first 100-odd users. Had you counted on so many non-Americans joining so fast?

A: The biggest surprise of the first week, which you and your colleagues are the evidence of, is the huge turnout from Spanish and Portuguese-speaking journalists. I’m scrambling to come up with an intelligent way to deal with the different languages on the site without creating too many divisions between users based on their location. As a researcher, it’s really exciting to me because it’s what we might call an “unintended use” of the site, and as a developer, it’s exciting to have a sudden need to push something up the feature queue in a hurry.

So, tell a journalist or blogger with a beat about ReportingOn, and I’ll keep working on adding features like comments, better profile pages, and an assortment of other things on my list.

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Here’s a clip from the IdeaLab post:

“Did I need the structure Drupal came with for users, posts, archives, feeds, and comments? Probably. But there was a whole bunch of other baggage, like all the WYSIWYG block and module organization that I wasn’t as comfortable with. My first instinct was to start from scratch and build my own theme, but I quickly realized I needed to build my own content types. And views. And the file system was confusing to me, coming from WordPress. Plus, although the Drupal community is full of awesome people building awesome modules, I still couldn’t figure out how to do a few simple things, like create a content type with a maximum length (say, 140 characters).”

Bonus: Django is fun, challenging in a productive way, and I know a ton of people working and playing with it.

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