I thought I would highlight some new developments in the area’s online news delivery sites. First though some follow up to some previous issues. Back on March 31st I wrote about how both the North County Times and SDNN had implemented widgets for sharing stories. At that time I pointed out some drawbacks in how they worked. Kevin Hall at SDNN responded that they had implemented a temporary workaround for the obscured widget issue and were working on a long term fix. They haven’t yet addressed the long title issue which is certainly a more complex problem. The North County Times has not improved the quality of the content for their AddThis widget either. Both widgets are very similar and vastly superior to the TweetThis WordPress plugin I was using. I have upgraded my blog to use the ShareThis widget based primarily on an evaluation by Vlad Zablotskyy. [Update: Please read Vlad's comment below.]
Previously I reported that pingbacks were not showing up on the SDNN site. After manually posting a link to my blog in a comment and griping about the function not working admin responded that they had been unaware of the issue and would work on getting it fixed in an upcoming release. In the meantime I would like to offer for consideration the solution employed by TechCrunch. They separate comments from pingbacks and trackbacks by placing pingbacks and trackbacks in a section titled Responses. I like this solution for media heavy sites though not necessarily for dinky, unread personal blogs like mine.
In current news, SDNN announced you could sign up to receive a digest of the days most important stories via email. My response was to immediately check http://time.gov to ensure that I hadn’t somehow traveled back in time to 2002. I am certain that their email feature will be useful to a great number of readers. However I believe that their efforts would be more productive if, instead of an email, they provided the next generation of tools. Specifically I think that SDNN needs to get their RSS feeds in order as they are the standard for syndicating content. In that vein I would like to recommend 10 Useful RSS-Tricks and Hacks For WordPress via @miketempleton.
On a more positive note SignOnSanDiego implemented a new comment system from Disqus. I liked the concept so much I followed suit and implemented it here. This comment system allows you to create an account with Disqus that can be used to comment on multiple separate sites. I will be interested to see how this works going forward. I have one major complaint, the same complaint I voice with Twitter. By having an account rather than an open solution there is only a single provider, Disqus, who controls the market. If I can find an open solution, especially one that attempts to be interoperable, I will switch.