About This Web Site

I'm an internet studies researcher at Syracuse University studying the local blogging phenomenon and writing a book chapter on the topic, focusing on OP as a case study. In late March I visited Chapel Hill and Carrboro and conducted a series of interviews with about 14 contributors to the site. I would like to expand the net of participants in my study to include more readers/lurkers, and others who post and comment.

I am interested in hearing feedback on the following questions:
1. Why do you participate in this site (whether as reader or contributor)?
2. Has your participation changed your ideas about local politics or your community in general?
3. Have you taken any direct actions or made any decisions based upon your participation in the site?
4. Describe instances in which your life in the community has been affected by events played out in the site.
5. What new role if any does the site play in the local community and the lives of its residents?

The weather is georgeous and we are going to do some spring cleaning at Orange Politics. There are currently about 50 unpublished guest posts hanging out in the system. We need to clean these up so that new posts can be easily found.

There is one small change to the guest posting instructions. You no longer need to inform the editors of your post. But this means that if you are working on an entry and are not ready for it to be published yet, you must save as "Private" to keep the editor's prying eyes out.

All old guests posts still in the queue by Thursday at 5 pm will be deleted.

And here are the updated instructions (with changes indicated by underline and strikeout). Remember they are always available on the right side of every page via the How to post on OP link.

Gina Trapani of the blog Lifehacker has written an informative tutorial called Lifehacker's guide to weblogs comments. Go read the whole thing and let us know - do Orange Politics commenters follow this guide?

These are the main points:

• Stay on topic
• Contribute new information to the discussion
• Don't comment for the sake of commenting
• Know when to comment and when to e-mail
• Remember that nobody likes a know-it-all
• Make the tone of your message clear
• Own your comment
• Be succinct
• Cite your sources with links or inline quoting
• Be courteous
• Don't post when you're angry, upset, drunk or emotional
• Do not feed or tease the trolls