We've been trying to provide some coverage of the Angora Ridge Fire on OurTahoe.org despite our limited resources during the Summer. We've been relying mainly on Tahoe residents uploading images to Flickr and RSS feeds from MSM outlets and blogs.

This morning I read an article in Editor & Publisher about how the Tahoe Daily Tribune was covering the fire news "blog-style".

Blog-style?

We've been working with Swift's online folks with the Notebook project, so I know they have serious issues with their CMS. Because the Tahoe Daily Tribue's staff are just updating the same post over and over, it doesn't show up in their RSS feed... and thus can't be aggregated by OurTahoe.org.

Since the fire jumped the line this afternoon and doesn't look like it is going to be put out any time soon, I put my knowledge of regular expressions and XML to use and scraped their "blog-style" page into useful RSS.

http://www.ourtahoe.org/custompages/scrapes/tahoedaily.php

Let me know if you find this useful.

Yesterday I asked Dave Winer what he would teach journalists.  He responded with the suggestion that the journalists should blog with existing software with instruction/feedback/conversations involving the local MSM and anyone else who'd like to stop by driving the instruction.

Interesting, but who is going to create checkbox news? Is that something you can create with a Blogger account?

Last semester I helped develop several projects that are really innovative approaches to complicated problems journalists face. 

Notebook - This is an alternative interface for commenting that tries to lead users to categorize their feedback by Tips, Facts, and Sources.  The comments are all fed into Drupal where they can be viewed by publication, journalist, tags, ratings, etc.  The goal of this project is to try to create value from comments instead of simply having a flame war at the end of every story.  The hope is that a journalist would go back to their Notebook before writing about a topic to see what users have said about other stories on the same topic.  I ran into javascript conflicts between fivestar rating, jquery scroll, and jquery tabs that I haven't been able to figure out.

I've submitted a session proposal to 2007 Open Source Content Management Submit host by Yahoo March 22and 23.  My session is titled Developer Eye for the Design Guy/Girl.   If you have the time, please sign up for an account at the 2007 OSCMS website and throw your vote my way. 

Last week Release Candidate 1 (RC1) of Drupal 5 was released. The core Drupal development team made some HUGE improvements in the organization of the administration tools dividing them between Content management, Site building, Site configuration, and User management.

By the end of the week, I have to choose between Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5 to build a site that will beta in January and go live to the public in February. I'm looking for feedback on the age old question of going with the known, stable framework or the exciting, new framework. Since the task of maintaining content and users is going to fall on the cohort of grad students studying interactive journalism, the improvements to the admin interfaces should reduce the amount of help the faculty and students need from me to run their site.

Drupal 5 includes JQuery, making it easier for developers to add AJAX functionality like Netflix-esque Fivestar module.

Michelle Cox has posted timeline for updating the popular 4.7 modules to work with Drupal 5. Notice the number of modules marked "Not started until after RC". The question I have to answer this week is, how long will it take to update the modules I absolutely need to work with 5? Are the improvements in Drupal 5 worth waiting for module developers to update their code... or taking on the burden of updating the module myself?