ASAP: The Associated Press Young Reader’s Initiative

I know I haven’t posted in the last week or so. Things have been crazy busy for me. I started my Fall Semester at NYU two nights a week. Tuesday’s it’s Political Economy of Digital Media and Wednesday’s is Broadband Networks. Two incredibly interesting classes, both geared towards my degree in Digital Media Management.

The other thing I’ve been working on has been the blogging platform for the Associated Press new young reader’s intiative, ASAP, which launched on Monday. We’re using Roller, a java-based blog tool for the three blogs that are due to launch just a week or so later, behind the project.

One feature Roller doesn’t include in it’s 1.2 release is the ability to moderate comments. Although Sun chose this app for their employee’s hosted weblog platform, a point of contention seems to be the inability to moderated comments. Bloggers, myself included, are strongly advocating Roller include a moderated comments feature in it’s next release. Not only do you want the ability to moderate comments to your blog to insure against foul language and things of that nature, but spammers have also found a way to post spam comments to a blogs un-moderated comments section and many bloggers are raising hell about it. Although blogging can be edgy and is many times implemented organically, there is still going to be a push in corporate circles to enable moderation.

It’s been a very interesting ride working with Roller. I’m really learning about the Open Source community, it’s strengths and weaknesses. I’ve had my share of hiccups with the program, but overall, it runs pretty good. Over the next few weeks, we’re going to try and contribute to the Roller project by building a few plug-ins for it. Hopefully, that will help both us and anyone else who’s been having a go at the software.

For this weblog however, it’s run on Wordress and I’ve got a plug-in that seems to have eliminated spam comments altogether. Pretty psyched about that.

It seems like I’ve just had no time to produce a new mix, get 5Pointz.com up and running and generally just have some fun. I did go to Atlantic City last weekend, which was cool, but the trip was overshadowed by my concern about the ASAP project. Oh well, you can’t win’em all. So, I’ll just move forward with what I’ve been doing and try to post more stuff over the next few days as the blog situation winds itself down.

Peace,

Tony Z.

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