A novel news service for San Diego launched a site into beta testing this week. Like the North County Times, the SDNN has opted to use blogging as a forum for communicating with the community. Unlike the NC Times, SDNN appears to have based their community forums on open tools allowing community members to participate using their established online persona instead of having to create new accounts inside a walled garden.
While the North County Times should enjoy a comfortable advantage as an incumbent, their inability to adapt to the realities of social media may cripple their ability to form a successful online community.
This post will serve as a test of how SDNN is configured to accept either trackbacks or pingbacks as comments.
[Update Mar 25, 2009]
The pingback appeared internally in their comment system and the count of comments reflects the pinpingback, yet the actual pingback did not appear on the site. I did not receive a reply to my tweet as to whether this was intended behavior.
[Update to the Update]
The pingback does appear on the SDNN blog site as a comment, it still does not appear as a comment on the news site.