Blogging Policy
From WEFT Wiki
This is a draft of a blogging policy for the WEFT website. Please feel free to edit this document—nothing is set in stone—but be prepared to discuss your changes, preferably via the WEFTweb mailing list.
To do here:
- Give examples of problems that the policy is intended to address
- Codify a specific policy
Contents |
Background: "Blogging", huh?
Blogs (or weblogs) are used by billions of people throughout the solar system to publish information—news, events, opinions, links—on the web. It used to be that in order to read new things on the Francophiliacs blog, you'd have to go to their website and read it there. Along came RSS, Atom, and feed aggregators, and now anyone in the solar system can pull new posts from the Francophiliacs blog and integrate these posts into their own website.
The goal of blog aggregation on WEFT's website is to have fresh content relevant to the WEFT community (listeners, members, and others in the area) always available on our site. This makes the website more engaging and useful to the community, while putting practically no extra burden (aside from lengthly email debates) on the people responsible for the website or the people writing blogs.
Technical details
Aggregation works by pulling down syndication feeds (RSS or Atom), parsing the feeds, and displaying the results dynamically on the WEFT website. Drupal has the ability to add and remove feeds and to categorize them and determine how frequently to update them. A cron job is run on the Dreamhost server that asks each Drupal module to do whatever periodic tasks they need to do; the aggregator polls whichever sites need to be updated, and stores the updates in a database table. Blogs can be categorized on our website, but not at the entry level; for example, our blogs are currently categorized under "Community Radio News" and "WEFTie blogs".
There is no functionality currently to permanently remove individual items, but removing or suspending a blog is a matter of a couple of clicks. There is also no way, currently, for a blogger to choose exactly which entries get syndicated. (More fundamentally, the aggregator has no knowledge of whatever categories the blog may use itself.) Both of these are features that could eventually be implemented if the demand exists.
Possible problems that haven't even come up yet
These are not policy; just examples of why a policy is necessary.
Proposed policy
Nothing that is unacceptable for WEFT's airwaves is acceptable on a blog syndicated to the WEFT website. If you can't say it on air, then WEFT won't republish it to its website.
WEFT reserves the right not to syndicate material deemed harmful to the financial, legal or operational safety of the station airing grievances and personal attacks against individuals and committees at WEFT, and against WEFT as a whole. This includes, but is not limited to, calls not to donate, or threats to do harm to the station. Decisions to remove syndicated content from the WEFT website is at the discretion of WEFT Management (Board of Directors, Station Manager).
Requesting addition and removal
- Who can ask to be listed?
- Extremely simple criteria for relevancy (remember, the goal is to make the site more useful to the community)
Administration
- Who has the ability to list and de-list blogs
- How do you appeal your de-listing
Disclaimer text and location
- Text analogous to the on-air announcement
- Location analogous to the frequency with which the announcement needs to be made
- Should it be on every page?
- At the top, bottom, middle? Left, right?
