We’re moving Coastsider’s calendars to Google Calendar. This will give us a bunch of advantages. You will be able to subscribe to Coastsider’s calendars more easily in iCal, your RSS reader, or your own Google calendar. Soon, we will be able to integrate your organization’s calendar into Coastsider’s calendars. This means you’ll be able to update your own events on Coastsider’s pages by yourself.

The calendars are still in testing, so take a look and tell us what you think. We’re still working on updating and correct the calendar, so please check all events with the organizer. We’ve taken the calendar off the home page until we’re satisfied with it.

To get to Coastsider’s new calendars, click on the "Calendar" link below the Coastsider logo.

Beginning now, comments from trusted members will be released as soon as they are posted.  We will no longer screen them before we publish them. Anyone who has posting access to Town Hall (about 150 users) is already a trusted member. If you go into any Town Hall forum and see a "New Topic" button, you’re already a trusted member. It’s easy get your account upgraded to trusted status.

1. Set your screen name on your account to your real name. You can do this by clicking on "Edit your profile" in the top of the left-side navigation bar.

2. Send an email to Barry Parr asking to be upgraded. Use the link under "Coastsider" in the left-hand navigation bar.

We still review all comments on Coastsider to make sure they’re civil, not offensive, and on-topic.  If you haven’t gotten your account upgraded, you can still post, but we will review your comments before we release them.

In reading a Q&A with New York Times Digital News Editor Jim Roberts, I was struck by how close the Times’s guidelines for readers posting comments are to the ones we use here at Coastsider. There’s nothing new in our guidelines or those of the Times. These principles are well known in the online community. However, other sites do operate under very different rules.

Early on, we tried running anonymous comments without prior moderation. We did get a lot more postings in those days. But Coastsider today feel more like a conversation among neighbors than a hit-and-run argument. Without these rules, comments tend to be anonymous, poor, nasty, brutish and short.

If you follow these rules, regardless of the forum you’re posting in, you’ll get more respect and better responses.

Unlike some other news sites, we review every single comment that readers send in. We have considered trying software that filters profanity or doing what other sites do and allowing readers to flag objectionable comments. But so far we have not found anything that substitutes for having trained editors or news assistants read each one to make sure it is suitable for publication.

So, what is suitable? Well, we do want to know what people think, and we grant our readers a degree of leeway in criticizing newsmakers and in finding fault with how we present the news. But we draw the line in these ways:

1. No profanity. No obscenity. No asterisks that take the place of letters in objectionable words.

2. No name calling or insults. I don’t like it when I see the words "idiot" or "moron" or "fascist." I can be somewhat tolerant of harsh criticism of public officials, but I am super-aggressive in deleting comments in which other commenters are being attacked. And while I don’t mind criticism of The New York Times, personal attacks on our reporters won’t be tolerated. And forget about ethnic, racial, religious or sexual slurs. Finally, try not to dominate the conversation so that other people have the opportunity to express their opinions even if they disagree with yours.

3. Stay on point. Comments that stray from the topic are pointless and will be bounced. And we tend to set the bar even higher when we have a huge flow on a certain subject and some of the sentiments seem repetitive.

4. Don’t bother sending press releases.

5. Don’t rage and don’t SHOUT. Lot’s of readers seem to think that UPPERCASE comments are more effective in getting their points across. We prefer a more tempered conversation.

6. Please use your real name. We don’t require this but we’d like to know who you are. If you sign your name Bill Clinton or Frank Zappa, we’ll in all likelihood delete it, unless we’re certain you’re the former president or the reincarnated Mother of Invention.

So, a week or two after I said I wouldn’t run a poll about anything important on Coastsider, I’ve decided to run a presidential poll. The project is part of NewsVine’s ElectionVine national Internet poll. I think it’s an interesting experiment and I’m going to be writing about electoral politics on the Web for my day job, so I thought it might be fun to try it out and see what happens.

Readers can vote once a month, and results are tabulated at the national as well as the site level.  I’m not sure what it means that Barack Obama is obliterating the competition at this early stage on the national poll, but I think this will tell us more about Coastsider readers than anything meaningful about the national election or even the state primary.

If you’re having trouble seeing the poll, you can see Coastsider’s results at the ElectionVine site.

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to appear on KQED’s Forum call-in program. The topic of discussion was the future of radio in the wake of the proposed merger of XM and Sirius satellite radio networks.  I have written a couple of reports on satellite radio for JupiterResearch. If you’re interested, you can still listen to the program on KQED’s website.

I also was able to participate in a discussion of the impact of the Internet on the news business, as the moderator of a remarkable panel that included the managing editor of WSJ.com, the publisher of Slate, and the supervising producer of CNN.com.  This discussion was at an interactive advertising club in New York. It was fun to participate in a more upbeat discussion of the news business than I usually hear these days. Of course, these guys are all working on the online side of their businesses, so it’s not surprising that they’re all in a good mood.

Anyway, I’m back in town, and I’ll be posting more Coastside news shortly.

What do you do when good people, people you consider to be your friends, make bad decisions—bad decisions that are not only self-defeating, but hurt the community?

MCTV does a great job of taping public meetings on the Coastside. They’ve done it for decades and for scant rewards.  MCTV’s camera operators are out there every night of the week with camera and tripod, when they could be home with their families.  They provide a valuable service and we’re lucky to have them working for us.  But the fruits of their labor could be more accessible to the Coastside community:

• Because the meetings are cablecast gavel-to-gavel, you have to watch two or three (or four or five or more!) hours of blah-blah-blah to see the agenda item you’re interested in.  That is, if you know it’s coming before MCTV transmits it.  You could tape it, but that’s not an ideal solution either.
• If you miss it—because you didn’t remember, or you didn’t know in time that something interesting was going on, or your VCR jammed, or Comcast was on the fritz, or you were just too busy at work to get home in time—you’re out of luck. Unless you pay MCTV $30 in advance for a DVD to be created just for you and delivered at some date in the future.  That is, of course, if you’re able to catch them on the phone or in their office. As a nonprofit, their office hours are pretty irregular. Last year, I left a message asking if they had a recording of a particular meeting. I never heard back from them.
• If you don’t have cable—because you prefer satellite, you can’t get cable, or don’t own a TV—you’re out of luck. Unless you buy DVD’s of every meeting from MCTV.
• MCTV’s schedule is idiosyncratic.  Sometimes meetings are transmitted the next day, sometimes it takes a week.  You can’t predict when they will be shown.  Today, as I write this, MCTV’s schedule is inaccessible from their website—but you can get it here on Coastsider.
• MCTV’s approach made more sense in 1985 than it does now.  Video on the Internet has changed everything.  And MCTV has not kept up.

In order to remain absolutely neutral, MCTV commits to cablecasting meetings from beginning to end. That’s commendable. But, the truth is that only a small portion of what MCTV shows can be described as newsworthy.

Coastsider wants to digitize just those portions of MCTV’s recordings that are newsworthy and make those available to the public on the Web. This not only solves the problems outlined above, but puts local government meeting in a context where they can be seen by many more people—at their convenience—and understood by a wider range of the community. We tried to do that once and MCTV’s lawyer (Executive Director Connie Malach’s husband Mike Day) ordered us to take it down.

We want MCTV to let anyone who’s interested redistribute their recordings. The reasons for this are ethical, practical, and legal.

You’ve probably noticed that posting has been light for the last week or so.  We’ll continue to update Coastsider this week, but it will be light until after the new year. We had an amazing 2006 thanks to our readers—and a little help from Devil’s Slide—and we’re looking forward to 2007.

If you’re reading this, you’re invited to the Parrs’ annual holiday party at our home in Montara. Coastsider readers are welcome to join us this Saturday, December 23 beginning at 7pm.  This is the third year we’ve extended an open invitation to Coastsider readers. We had a great time meeting our readers last year.

If you’d like to come, send an email using the "Email Barry Parr" link in the left-hand navigation column of Coastsider with "RSVP" in the subject line, and I’ll send you an Evite with directions to our house.