The online media world was in one helluva tizzy late Wednesday and early Thursday when someone discovered that CoveritLive, the live publishing interface used by many brands and news organizations, was no longer offering free accounts. Many of us have been using the ad-supported version of CiL to hold reader chats and publish liveblogs for years now – and we were quite surprised. With several big conferences and annual news events coming up, news orgs will need some alternatives in place very quickly.

As of Wednesday, CoveritLive’s trial/free plan allows for only 25 “clicks” (whatever those are) per month, with all other plans charging per “click” with a capped limit each month. In other words – this is no longer a viable option for most newsrooms.

Having only recently posted my praises of CoveritLive, I felt compelled to help by pulling together a list of alternative workarounds for live chats and liveblogging.

 
Thanks to our friends at Exile On Moan Street for locating this really high quality Youtube upload of the Gil Scott-Heron documentary The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.

Directed by Don Letts for BBC television, this is a superb piece of film making. With commentaries from Chuck D, Mos Def, Richie Havens, Clive Davis and more.

"Hello, I’m a core contributor to the open source WordPress project. My biggest contribution so far has been in the 3.1 release, where I developed the sortable admin columns, as well as adding advanced taxonomy and metadata querying capabilities."

Roundup of NPO/Philanthropy predictions at #nonprofit #blog

I’m about to disclose a secret recipe that holds vast powers of healing, not to mention a recipe that is enormously effective in scaring off the nosier of your neighbors and the more importunate of your bill collectors. If you’re not afraid to smell a little anti-social in the interest of good health and healing, then scroll down to go directly to the recipe for The Garlic Soup of Doom. Or read on, if you actually want to feign interest in learning why I am driven to concoct this potent brew again today.

Twitter is a social network that allows users to share brief, 140 character messages. Each time another user shares your message it is considered a ReTweet. ReTweets expand you reach as an individual or company and can contribute additional website traffic, subscribers and customers.

However, when you make the mistakes outlined in this post it can cause your content to be ignored and not get ReTweeted.

AnonOps blog

Of all the data analysis that I’ve done, day-of-week and time-of-day data has been consistently the most popular. So in preparation for my upcoming webinar, titled Science of Blogging, I decided to combine all of my existing data on timing with my new research into one master post on the subject.

According to this interview with Assange in Forbes magazine, Wikileaks will soon be releasing a trove of documents relating to a major US bank:

I recently upgraded my main external monitor to a new 27″ Dell display. All set to enjoy the high resolution glory of 2560×1140, I was perplexed. Why couldn’t I push the screen this high, using my MacBook Pro? The answer eventually turned out to be that the Mini DiplayPort to DVI adapter that Apple sells is limited to 1920×1200 resolution. The solution? A cheap Mini DisplayPort-to-DisplayPort adapter.

I find that shooting portraits in the square with a “normal” (80 mm) lens very often leads to the problem of where to put your sitter’s hands. The lens is not long enough to frame the head and shoulders tightly, and yet too long for full length studies, especially in confined indoor environments like this one. Combine the focal length and minimum focussing distance of this lens and the typical result is a half-body shot, which makes hand placement critical.

Awesome. Congrats, Mark! RT @BBluesman: Feeling the Love #blog about my #photo included in Flickr blog blah blah :)

I’ll admit that I’m still not terribly familiar with actually using Drupal, though I did finally install D7-alpha-6 on my laptop recently. But I have had the opportunity to observe its community some — online, in person, and through podcasts — and I’ve learned a little bit about how they manage the release of a new version. And so I have a pretty good perspective on comparing some traits the WordPress and Drupal communities. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: there is a lot we can learn from each other, and I think that it is a win-win for the community in doing so.

The other day, Klint Finley wrote a very good walkthrough of using the new Multisite functionality of WordPress 3.0. In the comments, a lot of people wanted to know how to use your own domain names. Since I’m doing that now, here’s a quick walkthrough/how-to guide.

Unanswered question: M26 vice X26 death rate per deployment
See a previous post from 7 April 2009: 'Call for Data (M26 vs. X26)' [LINK]

The limited (Canadian RCMP) taser usage data available suggests that there was a period during which the older (1999-era) M26 was actually deployed far more often than the newer (2003-era) X26. Another Canadian data set seems to suggest that during this same period the taser-associated deaths were dominated by the perhaps less-frequently deployed X26. These data sets [LINK] do overlap - but one is just the RCMP taser usage, and the other includes all taser-associated deaths in Canada (all police agencies). But even so, it is still very curious...

Today's post is the last in a three-part series on coffee. Monday's post investigated how coffee came to be such an integral part of everyday life. Wednesday's post provided a history of the coffee bean's travels around the globe. And today's discussion considers the social place of coffee in our lives. Be sure to go back and read the others if you've missed them!
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Happy Friday, folks. If you're on the East coast, I tried to time this post with your morning coffee—as I'm sure that many of you are just settling into your work day with your morning cup of java. And the truth is that you wouldn't be alone—the morning cup of coffee has become a regular ritual for many folks, who may believe they can't get started on the day's tasks without it. (Or they can, but prefer not to, and we'll get to why in a moment.) Coffee has attained tremendous importance among workers. Sidney Mintz, a renowned anthropologist who has written extensively about food, included it in a list for "proletarian hunger killers," which also includes sugar, tea, and chocolate (1979). Coffee is important to capitalism in many ways: it has spurred trade and the exchange of ideas, and like spices and other commodities, has served as leverage for controlling powers through the ages. It's a part of a larger global conversation, but have you stopped to consider it's role in your life? Yes, you've been told that there is a brand of coffee for you, but that still doesn't explain why you may buy it or why you permit yourself the indulgence of caffeine. Bring your coffee with you and let's peel back the layers a bit.

This week on AiP, I'm featuring a three-part series on coffee, with posts scheduled for Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. Monday's post investigated how coffee came to be such an integral part of everyday life. Today's post provides a history of the coffee bean. Be sure to stop by on Friday for the final followup discussion on the role of coffee today.
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So guess who gave us the English word coffee? I'll give you a hint: they were integral to the founding of the New Amsterdam colony. That's right: our friends, the Dutch. The word coffee dates to the late 16th-century, and is derived from the Dutch word koffie. But both the word and the product are much older than this, although the Dutch are a big reason coffee found its way to America. We talked on Monday about how coffee was marketed into our lives, and I mentioned that its value was linked to its origin. But where does coffee come from? Where did it originate and how did it get here, to the bags and cans of roast on the shelves of supermarkets to the coffee shops around the world? Today we'll take a quick look at global travels of the bean and on Friday we'll consider the role of coffee in current times.

Today's post investigates how coffee came to be such an integral part of everyday life. Look for additional posts on Wednesday and Friday for followup discussions.
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The idea of the morning person aside, morning commuters seem to fall into one of two categories: the Caffeinated and the Un-caffeinated. And they're easily recognizable as such. The Caffeinated are bright-eyed and engaged with the day's events already—they're reading their morning papers, or checking email, or reading for pleasure. They're sometimes armed with travel mugs or Ventis from their coffee shop of choice. They rattle the ice in the clear plastic beverage cups from mobile vendors on summer days. They walk a little faster in the early hours having long left last night behind. This is not the case for the Un-Caffeinated. This group sleeps through the AM commute both on the commuter trains and the subway.They're bleary eyed. Materials they intended to review lie unattended in their laps while they linger in the previous night. They walk more slowly up the stairs and are more irritable when you hurry them along—or hurry by them. They stroll, they trudge, they linger.

So I return from vacation to find the latest MailerMailer report citing average open rates for H2 2009 of 11.2%.

This number has declined every half-year since H1 2004, when it was 26.66%.

Email is an incredible tool for many things, but it’s also not a very good vehicle to communicate much of what most folks tend to use it for. And on top of that, we all just get so darned many! Reading email is more often a nuisance than an opportunity to many (most?) recipients. And that’s a particular shame because email is still considered the primary outreach channel for most organizations. In fact, it’s not just a shame, it’s an outright “problem” if your job is to engage both current and potential supporters in your cause.

I think it's safe to say that when these people say they want their country back, they aren't talking about the country of the 50s or 60s, with its "Tomorrowland" optimism. They want to go back to the Dust Bowl.

If this guy wasn't brainwashed, he'd be talking about how the wealthy should be pitching for these roads, but Rush tells him that taxes are evil, even for millionaires, and he believes it so fervently that he'd rather go back to a primitive state than challenge that orthodoxy. This is a sign of a culture in deep decline.

Maybe we need to realize that our old arguments about how Americans are so accustomed to living the good life that they would resist the natural consequence of this new feudalism aren't going to work. This anti-tax fervor has passed out of the political realm and into the religious. When people would rather that their kids choke on dirt than pay taxes, I'm guessing that pointing out that their unwillingness to pay taxes will result in tainted meat and dangerous drugs won't convince them. Living in a primitive state is a sign of their devotion.

One of the premier betterment projects in the history of the United States – and a major contributor to the productivity boom that made mindless consumerism so rewarding from the 50s onward – is literally being allowed to crumble to dust by people who just hate the idea of government services so much they will deliberately choose squalor over the most basic public improvements if it would mean they actually have to pay taxes to make their own lives better. It would be tempting to just let them do it, but of course it’s a lot of other people’s lives – particularly the poorest and those who most need basic infrastructure – that they’re also consigning to pre-war backwardism.

In case the name Oscar Grant is unfamiliar to you, he was the victim of a police shooting in the Bay Area, sometimes known as the BART shooting. The shooter, former officer Johannes Mehserle, was arrested on suspicion of murder, which was a reasonable charge to anyone with an internet access and a functional sense of decency. Kevin has video of the incident here, to which I direct you with a strong trigger warning. It is very upsetting to watch.

A mere three months after the officers in the Diallo case were exonerated, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band rolled into New York for a ten night stand at Madison Square Garden. It was here that they would play, for only the second time ever, a new song called “American Skin (41 Shots).” The song had been debuted at a show in Atlanta, Georgia right before the New York shows and it takes a mesmerizing and heartbreaking look at the Diallo case. The officers involved had fired 41 shots at the unarmed man and it’s this phrase that becomes the repeated mantra for the song. The song is not, despite the protests that were mounted by police organizations, a blatantly anti-police song. It delves into the shades of grey of the case and even sympathetically portrays one of the officer’s reactions immediately following the shooting. Ultimately Springsteen bemoans the fact that whatever American skin you wear, whether it’s the officer’s uniform or the immigrant’s work clothes, it’s possible that you could be killed for it. “We’re baptized in these waters and in each other’s blood…you get killed just for living in your American skin.”

He was just trying to teach the little bastard a lesson by swearing at him and then shooting him full of electricity while he was already on the ground. People have to learn to obey transit police officers unquestioningly and when they curse you out and threaten you out of the blue you have an obligation as a citizen to take whatever they mete out --- including death if they accidentally pick up their torture device instead of their killing device. Shit happens.

Like so many other Oakland residents, I've waited anxiously all week to hear whether justice would be served for Oscar Grant, the 22-year-old black youth who was shot by a BART officer last year. And now our answer's arrived. The verdict for Johannes Mehserle — the officer who shot him — is in: involuntary manslaughter. Crowds are gathering downtown to protest the outcome, and Bob Marley is getting wafted over speakers to try and keep folks calm.

Cheryl Contee

If your nonprofit wants to start engaging in online conversations, first you need to start by listening to what people are saying about your organization and the issues you work on. You will want to analyze the competition too. Here are some of my favorite online listening and analytics tools.

Redirection is a WordPress plugin to manage 301 redirections, keep track of 404 errors, and generally tidy up any loose ends your site may have. This is particularly useful if you are migrating pages from an old website, or are changing the directory of your WordPress installation.

I started writing my beginner's guide to WordPress SEO a while back, and have since done a load of posts on the subject, an article in the Search Marketing Standard, newsletters, and presentations. It's time to let all the info of all these different articles fall into one big piece: the final guide to WordPress SEO.

First I spent nine months looking for my next gig, landing at TBD as Director of Community Engagement. So I studied the issue from the hunter perspective. More recently I have filled five positions on my community-engagement team (hope to fill one more position before long). I have screened more than 100 applicants and interviewed more than a dozen.

I recently shared advice on redirecting and rejuvenating your career, and this post will overlap with that one. But here I will focus strictly on your pitch to your next boss.

The real crime here, though, is not that Childs’ hoarded the keys to the system. It’s that the meeting occurred at all, and the reasons that it came to the point of a stand-off are all too criminally common.  Was Childs guilty? Sure! But others shared guilt in bringing it to that point.

A lot of people ask me, “Where’s a good place to start” with film photography, which is a really broad question. Personally, my first experience was in the class I took when I was 10 years old, so I started off having a teacher explaining things to me… and continued that for many many years… I would recommend taking a class first and foremost, but I get that a lot of people can’t afford darkroom expenses, in which case I recommend reading. Lots of reading. In fact, I’ll give you a portion of what was my required reading list in the BFA Photography program at the School of Visual Arts:

The web is still buzzing about Google Buzz, sorry I just had to say it and everyone has their opinions about it. Personally I thank google buzz is great and I have my reasons to think that way but I’ll share those in another blog post. I did leave a comment on a webworkerdaily.com blog post called: Google Buzz: Already Better than Wave (and Maybe Facebook, Too) Saying: Yes, I think buzz is better than Wave at the moment for conversations but not for private collaborations. For that I’ll stick to Google Wave. Buzz is more like friendfeed than anything else. As for using it more than Twitter or Facebook in the future, I’m not sure but the possibility is there because it’s linked to google reader and my gmail.

I can’t talk about coffee houses and a coffee tour and not mention Cafe Du Monde. This was probably the number one place I ever had coffee.

Besides the fact that they are known for their long-standing coffee stand, chicory coffee, and beignets, they are located in the heart of New Orleans, Louisiana. I remember that I chose to not drink coffee on this trip, but gave in when we got to New Orleans. I couldn’t resist. It was raining that day (also was the 2-year anniversary of Katrina). The seating area inside, under the roof, is also open to the outside stree

The debate over measuring social media investment inspired many brands to cannonball into popular social networks and join the proverbial conversation without a plan or strategic objectives defined. At the same time, the lack of ROI standards unnerved many executives, preventing any form of experimentation until their questions and concerns were addressed.

In 2010, we’re entering a new era of social media marketing — one based on information, rationalization, and resolve.

The people who work in online advocacy and fundraising are some of the most creative people I know. In 2009 their campaigns made me laugh or helped me channel my frustration over injustices into action. A couple of them moved me so much that I even teared up. Here’s my list of the best websites and online campaigns from 2009.  

Take the answers to frequently asked nonprofit management questions from the project's founding partners, Third Sector New England and the Boston Foundation.  Bring these materials online in XML format,* with the items residing on the respective home web sites of the organizations that created them.

And then...

Add a search and aggregation engine powered by the Social Actions platform, which can organize and display links to relevant resources to those who seek answers to questions about nonprofit management.

And then...

Add one or two content partners, after a careful process of vetting the accuracy of their online information about nonprofit management. Use the IdeaEncore platform to manage and host information offered by partners who are not able to provide their nonprofit management content in XML format on their home web sites.

And then...

Launch a simple portal that enables a nonprofit manager to enter a few key words regarding his/her question, and which will then yield links to videos, white papers, cheat sheets, audio recordings, and other sources of practical knowledge on the topic.

Nice blog post by @benstein on replacing your iPhone screen

You can use this tool to calculate an estimate of cost and return on investment for the recruitment and fundraising efforts of your staff in social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace. It works sort of like an online mortgage calculator. Just enter the starting assumptions in the yellow boxes below and the tool calculates results automatically.

Let’s start by admitting that the fundraising pyramid is a lie. Most major donors at most organizations do not rise up through the ranks of $15 donors, who become $100 donors, and then ultimately become $100,000 donors.

Most major donors come to organizations via other major donors. Most low dollar direct mail or Internet donors hang around for a year or two and then stop giving altogether.

Core behavioral economics principles offer a clue why.

America's police force is killing people on a weekly basis with taser guns. There are not many states in the nation who have not been involved in a taser-related death this year. Tasers are now deployed in law enforcement agencies in 29 of the 33 largest U.S. cities.

BLEJWAS' BLOG ABOUT FAMILY, THE SOUTH, POLAND, RUNNING, TRIATHLONS, AND WHATEVER ELSE I PLEASE, THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

i am a 27 year old filmmaker and doctoral student currently stationed in chicago.

Welcome to Big Mama's Joint, where Big Mama, CL and Y-Factor share their innermost thoughts and feelings and offer free advice. Take your shoes off and sit a spell...we've got a lot to tell.

All of these are simple conventions for adding more standard metadata to a post in a specific, uniform way.

Our concept is for BuddyPress profiles and groups to act as hubs for the collaboration that happens on the Commons. Individuals flesh out their profiles with their research and teaching interests. Based on this information, groups form around common interests and projects. With only a small amount of development time – see, for instance, this hack that allows users to identify their interests in a more fine-grained way – BuddyPress excels at this kind of community building.

My ISP (Internet Service Provider) is hijacking my mistyped URLs! Instead of sending a “Does Not Exist” error when I type in an invalid URL, RCN is redirecting me to their search page.

Many popular posts here at Copyblogger are over 1,000 words. But other times, short posts pack the most punch. It’s almost as if the length of a post has no impact whatsoever on how successful a post becomes.

Yesterday, Jon Morrow talked about why you need to tighten up your writing. Today we’re going to talk about how.

Google's introduction of Wave is nothing if not ambitious. As opposed to saying "We have a new web mashup tool" or "We've taken multimedia email to a new level", they're pitching Wave as nothing less than the successor to email. My question, after seeing the demo, is "Is that an outrageous claim, or a way too modest one?".

Senator Edward Kennedy changed the face of education as we know it today; starting in 1964 when he made the first speech in favor of civil rights legislation which resulted in the integrated schools we have today.

The illness is aggressive war, a violation of the U.N. Charter and therefore of Article VI of the US Constitution. War crimes are unavoidable symptoms of aggressive war. And, even for those who support wars, there are war crimes that surpass the evil of torture. Who remembers the truckfuls of bodies, live bodies but only barely, dehydrated people licking and chewing the sweaty bodies beside them, screaming in agony, piled by the hundreds inside airless metal containers on flatbed trucks in desert heat, holes sometimes shot into the trucks with bullets for air -- but not into the roof, rather into the people already crammed inside -- remember that? Who remembers the truckfuls of bodies dumped out and buried by the thousands in mass graves by Afghan troops under U.S. command with U.S. forces present and aware, the same U.S. forces engaged in torturing prisoners who made it to the prison alive?

A post by Chris Brogan on “Strategic Blogging and Some Tactics to Nail It” for business got me thinking about how nonprofits could benefit from a full fledged blogging strategy. A well implemented blog with a solid strategy behind it can be an incredible tool to help you connect with supporters on the web. Let’s look at some goals, questions, strategy and tactics to get you started.

As if we need more proof, it seems the RGA has elevated Haley Barbour to lead the old guard. Far be it from me to make judgments about anyone's affiliations yet it does amuse me when people claim the high road while using the backs of others to get there.

It’s been an interesting few days for people who study social media. As the protests over election results have continued in Iran, and Iranian authorities have prevented most mainstream journalists from reporting on events, there’s been a great deal of focus on social media tools, which have become very important for sharing events on the ground in Iran with audiences around the world. I, like many of my friends at the Berkman Center and Global Voices, have spent much of the past two days on the phone with reporters, fielding questions

[Note: My cohort at Orcinus, Sara Robinson, has been nearly as preoccupied the past couple of weeks in dealing with media requests to discuss the recent spate of domestic terrorism now washing up on our shores. She posted her thoughts about it yesterday, and it was so good, I had to pass it along to our readers here. -- DN]

As you all have probably heard, Twitter is gaining popularity in leaps and bounds. All the new users mean more follower notifications arriving in my inbox, and Twitter's default messages aren't very useful. (The direct message notifications are pretty bare-bones, too, but I don't get many of those so it wasn't a priority.)

The report on abuse of captured terrorist suspects that the Senate Armed Services Committee completed last November has now been declassified. All 263 pages with light redacting can be read on-line here. (Warning: pdf.)

Sirup is a magazine and blog layout for Wordpress 2.5 and above. It has a fixed width, is valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional, supports Gravatars and Sidebar Widgets. You can customize the appearance of your site with an options page (that means you don’t have to edit PHP files).

For four years, Katrina survivors have been living in these toxic boxes. But there's more to this story than mere indifference or even incompetence - there was a concerted effort to push poor people out of the area after Katrina: