DISQUS

Actually, we have a community page on Facebook as well, with more than 130,000 subscribers:

http://www.facebook.com/pages/NPR/10643211755

We've taken the approach that it's important to be where communities are already established - Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and the like - while at the same time creating more opportunities for interaction on our own site. So it's very much a both/and strategy rather than an either-or one.

Rob: what this means is that anyone can now gain access to 250,000+ stories we've produced since 1995 and produce their own mashups out of them. Think of all the cool tools that've been developed for Twitter - Twittervision, Summize, etc - they're all made possible because Twitter allows users to tap into their databases, grab the content and make something new out of it.

For example, you could create a mashup that automatically generates a Flickr photo gallery based on keywords from NPR stories, and display it with the audio stream of each story. You could create a Google Map mashup that shows all the stories having to do with a geographic area. You could create Facebook widgets that play the audio of everything we've ever done related to the band Radiohead. You could create a mashup connecting our content to Twitter and do something so crazy I can't even fathom it. :-)

For stations, we're giving even deeper access to the API that we're giving the general public, which will allow you to put more NPR content on your site than ever before. Dan Jacobson can provide more details.

Yeah, there's not much posted yet, mostly because the first class of Knight trainees was graduating by the time the blog was ready to roll. It'll pick up in a couple of weeks when the next group of trainees begin their five-week stint with the program. And we've set up @nprknights on Twitter where they'll do some Twitter experimenting as well.

Very good points, Josh. In fact, my plan was to make similar comments when I wrote about having a station account be multiple staffers, but got sidetracked.

There's definitely a fine line between Transparency and Too Much Information, and most folks probably don't care about updates from an official station account with messages like "debating cornflakes vs. wheaties for breakfast." For new users of Twitter, it might even be a turnoff. I think that's perfectly fine for personal twitter accounts - color me guilty - but it's not something I would do, say, on the nprnewsblog account.

Having said that, occasional personal tweets like that have added character to the bpp account. I just wouldn't have it become a regular feature of it. Tweets like "cleaning up the breakfast I spilled all over the soundboard" are much more illuminating than ones just focusing on breakfast. :-)

Almost forgot to mention: the edit password is project.

Funny - I was just about to say the same thing about you. :-)