A Little Experiment With Searches

CapQ readers may notice a new search feature on the far right sidebar. I’m testing a Lijit account. It looks like it works a little better than my native search feature, and it allows me to expand the search parameters to Heading Right, Heading Right Radio, and other blogs as well. It uses the Google engine, and it includes a normal Google web search as an option. Give it a go, and let me know what you think.

AOL Puts Captain’s Quarters On The Hot Seat

Today, AOL announced a new partnership with several bloggers for a new project called The Hot Seat. Daily poll questions will appear, asked by the various members of the partnership, on AOL and on the blogs. The partnership includes Captain’s Quarters and Power Line, as well as some well-known media sites:

AOL has launched a syndicated online political widget – called “Hot Seat” – on AOL News, http://news.aol.com. “Hot Seat” features daily political poll questions from some of the biggest political bloggers on the Internet, including The Huffington Post, Time’s Swampland, Slate, The Politico, Crooks & Liars, Power Line and Captain’s Quarters. The questions address current political issues and events as a way to stimulate a dialogue between voters, pundits and politicians. “Hot Seat” also features responses from major presidential candidates to specific questions posed to them by bloggers and pundits.
“Hot Seat” will be displayed on all AOL News, Elections and Political Machine pages as well as participating sites outside the AOL network. The “Hot Seat” widget showcases real-time poll question results on both a national and state-by-state level, while letting users share and discuss their views with users of various sites. Through “Hot Seat,” candidates will be given an opportunity to respond to questions and comment on the results of the various polls while providing an outlet that allows the public to become deeply engaged and integrated in the political blogosphere.
“AOL News has created a unique experience for the upcoming election unlike anything else on the Web,” said Lewis Dvorkin, Senior Vice President, AOL News and Sports. “By syndicating the polling, ‘Hot Seat’ creates a forum where voters can participate in an ongoing debate with the 2008 presidential candidates – regardless of which site they use.”

Occasionally, I’ll post polls for fun and interesting stories, but this will have more reach and have many more features than before. I will write my own poll questions, and AOL’s network will allow for many more participants than before. We will operate on a rotating schedule, and fortunately, tomorrow is my day. The question will go live around 8 am CT, so keep checking for the poll — and later, we’ll have more news about how BlogTalkRadio will be part of this exciting concept!

Kicking Up The Ruckus

Newsweek has launched a new feature at its website called The Ruckus, in conjunction with the Media Bloggers Association. The Ruckus will track the postings of nine bloggers on the presidential race from now until Election Day in November — including Captain’s Quarters:

Media Bloggers Association (MBA) and Newsweek have launched “The Ruckus,” a new group blog about politics for Newsweek.com. The blog will feature posts from nine MBA-member bloggers about the presidential campaign on a single page, giving Newsweek.com readers a convenient sampling of some of the best political blogging from across the country and from key primary states.
” ‘The Ruckus’ places Newsweek on the cutting edge of this campaign season’s online political dialogue,” said Robert Cox, president of MBA. “MBA bloggers offer Newsweek readers fresh, authentic content with real-time updates from some of the nation’s leading political blogs.”
” ‘The Ruckus’ will be a key part of our 2008 campaign coverage,” said Deidre Depke, editor of Newsweek.com. “We want to expose Newsweek readers to all the exciting discourse and discussion that is taking place on political blogs today. We think ‘The Ruckus’ will help introduce readers to a new array of voices and will encourage enlightened political discourse as the ’08 race steps into high gear.” …
The initial participants in “The Ruckus” include: John Amato, crooksandliars.com; Faye Anderson, andersonatlarge.typepad.com; Dean Barker, bluehampshire.com; Adam Fogle, palmettoscoop.com; Joe Gandelman, themoderatevoice.com; James Joyner, outsidethebeltway.com; Ed Morrissey, captainsquartersblog.com; Oliver Willis, oliverwillis.com; and Chris Woods, bleedingheartland.com.

This should give everyone a boost. Newsweek readers unfamiliar with blogs can get acquainted with fresh voices, and blog readers can also keep up with a wide spectrum of analysis. I’m happy to have been included in this (and will receive nominal compensation for it), and excited by the possibilities.
Danny Glover writes:

It’s a great idea, one driven by the same kind of thinking that prompted me to create AirCongress — namely, build a portal to the best new media content so readers can get it all in one place. This is the future for smart old-media companies, and more of them would do well to imitate Newsweek’s model.

Agreed. Hopefully it will broaden many horizons.

The 2007 Retrospective

We’re coming to the end of another great year here at Captain’s Quarters, and just as with most enterprises, it provides us an opportunity to review the work done over the past twelve months. Rather than decide for myself which posts rise (or sink) the farthest, it makes more sense to me to ask the CapQ community. What posts touched you the most? Which posts engaged you? Which left you cold? Which just flat-out got it wrong?
Granted, this is a rather large task, given the volume of posts here. However, I’d love to get some nominations for Best and Worst Posts here at Captain’s Quarters in 2007. I’ll try to narrow it down to three each, and I’ll put up a poll in time for the last week in December for finals voting. Feel free to include your arguments in favor of your nominations, and to reply back to other comments in the thread. I’ll decide on the finalists before Christmas and give an explanation for my selections when I post the polls. The CapQ community will get the last word, of course!
I hope everyone enjoys the stroll down memory lane as much as I will!
ADDENDUM: I’d like to thank my friend and excellent satirist Jon Swift for the inspiration for this idea.

Media Alert (Update: Time Change)

I’ll be interviewed on C-SPAN2 sometime after 10 pm CT tonight. The topic will be the Republican debate earlier today. Normally we’d live-blog this at Heading Right, but thanks to the odd time the Des Moines Register chose for this debate, most of our correspondents won’t be able to watch it live. I’ll post my debate analysis after my Heading Right Radio show concludes. (I’m TiVoing it, as it will run during the show itself.) Be sure to catch my telephone interview during Capital News Today.
UPDATE: Thanks to an extended Senate session, they had to pre-record the interview, which I just completed. C-SPAN2 will play it after they replay the debate, which is on right now — actually just finishing up. I’m guessing that they’ll run this around 11 pm CT.
UPDATE: It looks like it will be more like 10:30 pm CT. It’s coming up soon. Sorry for the confusion.

E-Mail Alert

If anyone attempted to e-mail me over the last 24 hours, I probably didn’t receive the message. A large message with multiple attachments remained on the server yesterday, and I went over my limit on the mailbox. If you sent me something important yesterday, you may need to re-send it.

Comments Policy Update II

We’ve gone about two weeks with the new comment system from Disqus at CapQ, and I’m pleased to see it working as well as it has. The folks at Disqus have received a lot of feedback from the commenters here, and have quite a list of updates to implement. The outstanding issues that I’ve seen include:
* Absolute timestamping (time zones are the trip-up, I understand)
* Viewer option for threading or flat displays
* Either a preview option or an edit option
* Sorting options on an individual basis (hot, old, new, etc)
They have a couple of requests from me, too, and I look forward to their implementation.
Some people have written me with questions about the change. I’d like to address the answers to everyone:
Why change at all? — I have been dealing with an increasing level of trolls and sock-puppets, and quite frankly, it’s made me overreact in some cases of off-topic commentary and other issues. I’d rather have a registration system that keeps those issues from popping up at all, and take it off my plate entirely. I tried Typekey, but that caused more problems than it solved.
Why Disqus? — Movable Type does not include a very good comment-management system, and the Typekey option didn’t work well. Disqus was suggested by a CapQ reader who works there, and I liked the easy interface and the threading, voting, and other features of the system.
Why the threading? — One of the issues I had to police before was off-topic commentary. With threading, that mostly polices itself. People can reply to specific comments, and if that goes off on a tangent, it’s limited to that thread. Commenters can also vote other comments into disappearing on their displays so that they don’t need to trip over commentary they feel is off-topic.
I don’t like moderation — Well, neither do I. I’m actually not moderating Disqus for content, but for verified registration. If you want your comments to appear immediately, verify your registration with Disqus, and it doesn’t wait at all to appear. Those comments that do get held for verification have to wait for me to check the queue and clear the backlog. I will require verified registration and block all other comments in the next couple of weeks, so please make sure you complete the verification process with Disqus soon. I’m waiting for some of the above fixes to come first.
Thanks for your patience. I’m hoping to improve the experience here at CapQ with these changes. Feel free to post your thoughts on this in the comments section for this post. Both myself and Disqus will be keeping a close eye on them!

Comments Policy Update

We’ve been on the new comments system for a few days now, and I’m pretty happy with the results. The Disqus system allows for direct replies, user ratings, and takes the processing load from my servers. It also does a better job of keeping spam out of the comments section than Movable Type, which makes it easier to maintain as well.
As noted earlier, we will move towards restricting comments to registered users only. I’m going to start that process today to keep the trolls and sockpuppets out. We’ve had a few take advantage of the new system, and I want to keep from having to overmanage that aspect of it. For the next couple of days, comments from unverified users will get reviewed by me and posted if appropriate. By Monday, commenters will need to have a Disqus registration in order to participate in the CapQ forums.
Thanks for your patience!
UPDATE: Make sure you’ve verified your account with Disqus. That requires an e-mail process, but I do not have access to the e-mail addresses.

Relaunch Of The Crows Nest

I’ve begun a relaunch of The Crow’s Nest today, the blog-within-the-blog here at Captain’s Quarters. The Crow’s Nest contains links to articles of interest, but which don’t fit into the normal style and substance of CapQ. It’s my way of highlighting blog posts that otherwise wouldn’t get a mention here, and of supporting some great bloggers.
Expect to see a couple of fresh posts each day with the best of the blogosphere represented. Today we have links to a Fred Thompson interview at Pajamas and a spicy response from Norman Podhoretz to Andrew Sullivan. The Crow’s Nest is only available through the web version of Captain’s Quarters, so be sure to check the site even if you normally read from the RSS version!

Just Another Texas Sunrise

ccsunrise.jpg
That was the view from my balcony this morning in Corpus Christi. It should have been the last Texas sunrise I saw on this trip, but unfortunately my luck on airline travel ran out this evening. I had a tight transfer schedule to get me from Corpus Christi through Houston to Minneapolis this evening, but a static discharge assembly on our Continental Express flight had to be replaced. It delayed the flight for two hours, and I missed my connection. Instead of being home, I’ll spend the night in Houston instead.
That means I’ll miss most of the Northern Alliance Radio Network tomorrow, but my partner Mitch Berg will hold down the fort. I’ll make it home tomorrow afternoon, rested and relaxed after an easy flight home. At least that’s what I hope!
In the meantime, I’ll work on some of the podcasting from the conference and tour of the Chevron facilities, including the Blind Faith rig about to launch next month. I’ve posted the key part of Thursday’s webchat at Heading Right, in case you missed it — and don’t forget that you can join our live webchat during our live broadcasts every day.