RSS Users Fear Not: You Will Still Be Able To Subscribe To Rockville Central Articles

Click the image for the RSS feed address!

People who use RSS feed readers to keep up with news have shared dismay at our recent decision to shift to an entirely Facebook platform. They worry they will not be able to see our articles in their readers. But, fear not! You can subscribe to an RSS feed for all of Rockville Central’s “notes” which are what our articles will become.

Simply add this subscription to your feed reader:

http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notes.php?id=11270373798&viewer=0&key=c034072652&format=rss20

(If that seems like a lot of gobbledeygook to you, don’t worry. RSS readers will get it.)

Have A Wonderful Thanksgiving!

Gentle Readers,

Rockville Central will be taking a brief holiday so that we can enjoy Thanksgiving with our families.

It brings us great joy to serve the community by providing daily news and views to our neighbors and friends, but everyone needs a rest sometimes!

We will resume publication on Monday, November 29.

Thank you.

Your friends Cindy Cotte Griffiths and Brad Rourke.

New Short Links Using rkv.bz

Tweet This!

Gentle readers, our sincere apologies if much of this post is gibberish to you. But we’re trying to stay at the forefront of things!

We’re delighted to announce the new Rockville Central link shortener: rkv.bz. This is feature that people who use Twitter will find very useful. (Are you on Twitter? Awesome! Follow our account: @rockville.)

At the bottom of every article, just click the “Tweet This” button, and the tool automagically sets up a Tweet for you with a “short” link like this one: http://rkv.bz/92jVIi. In the photo, you can see the button in all its glory.

So, if you see us starting to share links that start with “rkv.bz” you’ll know what’s going on.

Political Opinion On Rockville Central: What’s Your Advice?

Gentle Readers:

Occasionally, through the last three years of our existence, we’ve asked you to help us think through an important administrative issue. Conversations like these are how our current comment policy — we require full names — came into being. Now, we’re asking for your best thinking on another vexing question.

Photo by Flickr user Margaret Anne Clarke

If you follow Rockville Central at all these days, it is hard to avoid noticing the many Contributor Opinion articles focusing on a state Senate primary race. While this will all be over soon, and who represents Rockville is indeed an important question, it is clear that so much political argumentation is crowding out other, equally important issues.

For instance, the recent piece about Redgate Golf Course by Anne Goodman and Jim Farrelly has been just about buried in an avalanche of articles proclaiming loyalty to one candidate or opposition to another.

We’re Working On It

We want you, our readers, to know that this is an issue that we recognize and are trying to grapple with. Rockville Central has become an online political battleground. This is, on the one hand, flattering. It also draws traffic to the website, which is pleasing. Yet on the other hand, it is exactly what we don’t want.

Politics is a funny thing. Election campaigns are important, true. But all too often, a political focus trumps other items. This happens, in part, because the people for whom politics is important find it very important. They are motivated to discuss and argue over their positions and candidates — and before you know it, we’ve become a “political” blog.

But Rockville Central isn’t meant to be a political blog — we’re a civic blog. From the beginning, we have been dedicated to being a safe space for people to raise important issues, and to have some fun. Election campaigns are just one small slice of civic life. We need to make sure we are not losing sight of that.

What To Do?

We’ve gotten feedback from a number of quarters that basically boils down to this: “Politics is important and all, but that’s not why I visit Rockville Central.”

It would be easy to, say, limit political articles from readers. That is something we are examining. But our norm, for three years now, has been to have a very strong bias toward publishing just about all Contributor Opinion pieces from readers. We felt that, in this case, it would not be fair to change the rules on people mid-stream. Moving forward, though, we’ve got to get a handle on this issue so that everyone can enjoy Rockville Central, not just political junkies.

Another thing to keep in mind is that every political article is open for comment. If we limit political Contributor Opinions during campaign time, there is still the outlet of posting a comment. No one would be having their opinion fettered. Posting a comment actually creates more give and take. When every opinion becomes its own article, this leads to a shouting match rather than an exchange.

Here are a few ideas that are possibilities:

• Designate a “political week” for each race and hold all opinion pieces until that time.
• Establish a daily or weekly limit on political opinion articles. (Two per week? One per day per candidate? Some other formula? We would rather not place any limits, so this is not our favorite option.)
• Post a single “discuss the campaigns here” article and invite people to comment all they wish.
• Post one “why are you supporting Candidate X?” article for each person in the race, and allow the comments to unfold from there.
• Create a separate “political opinion” category, and format the home page so these appear somewhere all by themselves, instead of mixed into all the other opinion pieces.

Those are just a few ideas.

Please Help

What are your thoughts? What haven’t we thought of?

We really feel we need to get this right, as we expect the next City election, coming up in just one year, may well be equally hard-fought. We want to make sure we are a civic space that is useful to all, even those who have only a passing interest in electoral politics yet are deeply concerned with other issues.

Your input — and your best thinking — is what we need right now. You’ve never let us down.

Thank you.

Rockville Central Now Accepts Advertising

Home Page showing ad location (click to enlarge)

We’re delighted to announce that Rockville Central now accepts advertising.

For years, we have not done so, preferring to grow the site as a volunteer effort. In the last few months, we have come to realize that it is time to take the “next step” and grow. Running advertisements will make it easier for us to create a sustainable site, and also to highlight all the local businesses and organizations that are a part of our Rockville civic fabric.

We’ve developed a page that gives you all the details you need right here.

But here are a few of the highlights:

. . . . . . . . . .

About Rockville Central

• Focus: News and Views of Rockville Maryland — Breaking local news, politics, elections, development, city and county issues, events, recreation, entertainment, business, crime reports, volunteer opportunities, and contributor opinions.
• Founded: June, 2007
• Consistently One of the Top 5 Most Read Community Blogs in Maryland, as surveyed by Maryland Politics Watch
• Rockville Central was started to give people a civil and courteous way to participate in their community. People can find out what’s happening, be involved in public life, and express their opinions.
• Current traffic approximately 15,000 page views per month. (But growing and varies. Peak monthly has been 28,500 page views in one month.)
• Our reader survey shows:
  • 88% of our readers live in Rockville, Maryland. 11% live in Montgomery County.
  • 68% are 45 or older. 22% are 35-44 years old.
  • 90% have a bachelor’s degree or higher.
  • 50% have a household income over $125,000 per year.
  • 45% Use Facebook daily.
  • Are active and involved in the community.

Advertising Options:

We currently offer two advertising options.

Home Page Box: Medium (300px by 250px) box in sidebar, visible on all pages. This ad slot will rotate between up to 5 advertisers.

Article Box: Medium box at bottom of page on article pages only. This will appear between the article body and the comments area. Rockville Central has a thriving comment section, so this is a desirable slot. We will rotate these ads between 3 advertisers.

For ad rates, visit the detail page!

Thank you so very much for your support.

Reading Rockville Central’s Feed? Update Your Reader!

Update your feed reader!

Just a note to our more technically-inclined readers — you know who you are. You’re the one who Tweets every thirty minutes, has multiple mayorships on Foursquare, and reads Rockville Central using a feed reader. (If the following is gibberish to you, then don’t worry as it doesn’t apply to you.)

We are migrating our feed address from Feedburner to Feedblitz. This gives us more control over the final look of the feed.

What this means for you: You must update our feed address in your reader.

Please update your feed reader to pull our feed from this address: http://feeds.feedblitz.com/rockvillecentral

The old feed address will be operable for a while, but if you forget to do this at some point you’ll just lose the feed!

Thanks so much for reading.

Reminder: Please Take Our 2010 Reader Survey

Just a quick reminder!

It’s been more than a year since we last surveyed Rockville Central readers. In the interest of continuing improvement, we have developed a new reader survey that will help us tailor the site as we move forward.

We are always trying to do better and your input is hugely important!

Please follow this link to take the survey.

It’s only 17 questions and should not take more than 15 minutes. Your responses are completely confidential.

(Photo credit: tj scenes/Flickr)

Rockville Central Website Changes This Weekend

Dear Rockville Central readers:We are aware that in recent weeks many of you have been getting error messages when you try to post comments, read articles, or generally interact with the site. This weekend we are planning to move the entire site to a new webhost provider (Dreamhost, for those who are interested in such things).It’s not as simple as just dragging a few files from one folder to another, so we hesitated to do this, but we feel it’s necessary. We’ve been developing the new site all this week, and plan to “flip the switch” over the weekend. It is possible, but unlikely, that we will have a short period of downtime as that happens. Just a heads-up!The look and feel of the new site will be the same, and the address will still be >http://rockvillecentral.com as it always is. Please let us know if you notice problems.

The only real change you may notice is that, for those articles you have signed up to receive comments on, you won’t be signed up anymore. We are not able to transfer that portion of the database. Moving forward, though, you will be able to subscribe to comment emails as before.

Thanks for your ongoing support!

Please Take Our 2010 Reader Survey

>It’s been more than a year since we last surveyed Rockville Central readers. In the interest of continuing improvement, we have developed a new reader survey that will help us tailor the site as we move forward.

We are always trying to do better and your input is hugely important!

Please follow this link to take the survey.

It’s only 17 questions and should not take more than 15 minutes. Your responses are completely confidential.

(Photo credit: tj scenes/Flickr)

Rockville Central Joins Local News Startup TBD.com

We are proud to announce our new partnership with >TBD.com, a startup local news and information site focused on the greater DC area. TBD.com is an initiative of Allbritton Communications — the organization that started Politico.com and that owns WJLA. We are ecstatic to be a part of TBD.com’s community network and especially flattered they reached out to us. (Here is a good article that tells you more about TBD.com.)

In their announcement, TBD.com describes Rockville Central this way:

Brad Rourke and Cindy Cotte Griffiths keep Rockville from getting lost among the other news in the region by highlighting news stories alongside opinion pieces and guest commentary. Rockville Central just celebrated its third birthday.

We thank them for the nice words!

TBD.com will run Rockville Central content on its site, and we may run their content here, too. But the primary relationship is that we are providing the view-from-Rockville.

What this means for Rockville Central readers is that you will likely see some site design changes over the next month or two, as we reconfigure slightly to accept ads from TBD.com’s ad network.

We will also begin selling ad space to local businesses and organizations that would like to tap into the exposure a local blog can give. These ads will run across the TBD.com network, as well as on Rockville Central. We are committed to being a resource for Rockville and continuing to grow — we think this new relationship will help us accomplish both those things better.

More On Rockville Central's Comment Policy: Full Names Required

Dear Readers:Thank you for continuing to make >Rockville Central an important destination for information and opinion about what’s going on in Our Fair City. Yesterday we had 1,836 page views, which I believe may be a record for us. As a recent article made clear, we continue to try to hone our comment policy and to balance openness and responsibility. We discovered what looked like abuse of the commenting system and implemented some controls that we hope will put an end to it.

We also want to let you know about another control we are formalizing. As many know, we in general are opposed to people commenting under pseudonyms, even ones that are not meant to hide a person’s identity. But we believe that Rockville Central needs to be a forum where people truly own their words. We do not want things written in the comments that people would not say to one another face to face, in a public setting.

For that reason, we are going to be requiring comments to be attributed by first and last name before we approve them for publication. That includes pseudonyms like “Fred In Hungerford,” even if the comment is positive.

If feel you have a pressing need to remain anonymous due to personal safety reasons, please email us and ask ahead of time ([email protected]).

Cindy and I know that there are some people who will be made uncomfortable by this. We are sorry, but believe this is best for the overall health of the space. There are many forums where people can comment and express opinions anonymously or pseudonymously. This is not that place.

Thank you.

Comment Policy And Multiple Aliases

Dear >Rockville Central readers:

As many of you know, our comment volume has been going up and up, and with the volume we have had a number of challenges as we try to balance openness with the necessity of keeping a civil forum. Cindy Cotte Griffiths and I have felt that we have reached a good equilibrium where, for the most part, we have no completely anonymous commenting and relatively few over-the-line instances of bad behavior. There have been a few judgment calls, and recently we decided to get a little stricter with what we approve, as people’s emotions began to run higher. But by and large it’s been working.

We have a new issue and a new policy we want to draw your attention to.

We recently discovered through looking at our log files that we may have had instances where people have logged comments under multiple pseudonyms. These are called “sock puppets” in the online world, and there is no online forum where they are tolerated. Rockville Central is no exception.

The best way to make sure sock puppetry is not going on is to ban the IP address on comments where we detect what appear to be intentional multiple comment logins (after first looking to make sure it is not multiple people logging in at one place of business, or some other obvious legitimate reason).

We are posting this note to let the community know that, from now on, that is what we are going to do. We have added a warning to the brief instructions above the comment-entry box, and we will not allow comments from IP addresses where there is evidence of multiple comment logins. IP addresses where that is happening will be banned from commenting.

Thank you for your ongoing support.

Comment Policy: Focus On The Civil

Dear >Rockville Central readers:

As some might have noted, there is an election coming in a few weeks (November 3, in case you wondered). As happens when it’s campaign time, emotions are running a bit high. Editor Cindy Cotte Griffiths and I have been amazed at the volume of comments and gratified that so many readers see Rockville Central as a good place to discuss issues.

However, with the increase in comment volume, we feel the need to refine our comment policy in order to protect the civil and respectful qualities of this space. Rockville Centralhas always been intended to be a blog where we can discuss issues in a measured way. Sometimes we worry it may have lost sight of the “measured” part of that goal, in favor of being open to all.

Moving forward, we plan on tightening our moderation of comments. That means fewer comments will be approved. We will not approve comments that are clearly mean spirited or do not add to the discussion. We will be especially careful of comments that are critical of individuals. There are ways of criticizing behavior without criticizing people.

Our suggestion to people who wish to leave comments is to stop a moment and think about whether and consider whether you would really say what you are writing to an acquaintance or friend. That’s the bar we want to adhere to.

We will continue to actively seek out views that differ from our own, and to try to maintain a fair and impartial policy — both in attitude and in practice. We do not moderate comments based on ideology or because we disagree on the viewpoint of a writer.

We recognize that this policy refinement may cause some to lose interest because the comments will get less active. We accept that. We hope that it will also cause some readers togain interest, because there will be more room for thoughtfulness.

Thank you.

August In Our Fair City

Gentle Readers:In newspaper circles, they call late August the “silly season.” This dates from days of yore when summer really changed the landscape of things. People went on vacation, offices closed. It was the time of year when not much happens. It’s called the silly season because newspapers, which had to fill page after page of newsprint every day, would choose this time to trot out the silly stories that made you scratch your head: >This is news?

Well, no, it wasn’t, but there were inches to fill. In the world of online volunteer local news sites, we don’t have that problem!

And so, while the world no longer slows down as much as it did, in many ways summer is still a slow news time. It’s also a time when people take a bit of a break! And so you may see our volume of stories decrease as we head into the bottom innings of summer.

Rest assured, we’re still here, and as things pick back up (typically when school starts up again) the stories will become more plentiful.

Meantime, enjoy your silly season.

Here is one way you can help: Send us news tips! This is a community resource!

Your friends at Rockville Central

Yesterday's Rockville Roundtable Breaks Ground

If you missed yesterday’s >Rockville Roundtable lunch at Benjarong Restaurant, you missed a great conversation! These monthly lunches started out as a lark back in February 2008, when I announced I would be having lunch at a certain place on a certain day, and invited whoever wanted to to join me (Dutch treat of course). I thought maybe three people would show up, but a dozen people came to join me and right then and there we decided to keep it going. Every month we meet at a different place, and we change the day of the week, too, so more people can make it over time.

At these lunches everyone is welcome and there are no set agendas. City and state elected officials have attended and it is always an interesting give-and-take. People just bring up topics that interest them and we all talk about them.

Yesterday we broke ground in two ways.

Candidates Calling

First of all, we had four candidates for office attend: Piotr Gajewski (who announced he is running for re-election to city council); Cheryl Kagan (running for state senate in 2010); Phyllis Marcuccio (running for mayor); and Waleed Ovase (running for city council).

Each one of these candidates had a chance to say a few words — and they did! Each gave a quick overview of why they are running and what they would bring to the office, if elected.

There was some controversy ahead of time, which is another first for this lunch. Piotr had let me know ahead of time that he wanted to declare his intentions at the Roundtable. While the lunches are always open to everybody, and to any topic, I was also a bit worried about how it would really work. By getting together every month with an ever-changing group of Rockville friends, we’ve created a very inviting and intimate space and I did not want to lose that. Low-key, small scale — that’s us. The Roundtable is not a “political” lunch, it’s a civic lunch. But the Gazette mentioned in yesterday’s edition that Piotr would be making an announcement and I got a few emails from regular attendees that were uncomfortable about that.

My feeling was that I would allow any candidate to do a similar thing — which is not to make a big speech but just to talk about what they are up to.

In the end that’s what happened: all the candidates got their say, but it was not a big deal. I have not spoken to some of the people who raised concerns since the lunch (I had to run and do some other work for a client right afterward), but my sense was that there was a good balance struck between fairness to all, openness of the space, and the fact that like it or not it’s election season and there are fellow community members who are standing for election and who would like to tell us about that. (I welcome differing views on how it went, either in the comments or directly by email.)

Then we moved on to what, for me, was the real ground breaking aspect of yesterday’s lunch.

Talk About Comments

As many readers know, Rockville Central has had some growing pains over the last few months. Our readership has shot up and with new friends we’ve gotten a lot more new activity in the comments. Sometimes the tone has gotten mean, and we’ve struggled to figure out a reasonable policy that balances all the values we are trying to uphold: helpfulness, openness, fairness, transparency.

The difficult thing is that there is no one correct answer to this conundrum. I have been getting many concerned emails, but they are on all sides of the issue, ranging from a strong conviction that it’s crucial to retain the ability to comment anonymously so people feel free to speak, to the equally strong conviction that we need to filter more objectionable comments than we now do and that all people should be required to give a full name and address.

So Cindy Cotte Griffiths and I have been struggling with what to do, now that we are getting, some days, ten and more comments where we used to get ten a month.

And so, we talked about it yesterday and I was simply over the moon by the time the conversation ended. Everyone had very, very good points. But even more uplifting was how the exchange of views allowed us all to see new possibilities for how we might handle the issue, and to see how other points of view besides our own — even if we don’t agree with them — are also valid.

By the end of the lunch, we had hit upon what I think is a good plan for moving forward, and I will be implementing a new comment policy over the next few days. The main points of the new comment policy will be:

• All comments will be held for review before posting
• We will apply a fairly strict rule for what gets approved. We’re not going to approve comments that criticize other people in personal or mean-spirited ways,
• Instead of just deleting such comments, though, we’ll send a note to the commenter telling them why we are not approving their comment and encouraging them to resubmit

Note that anonymous comments are OK but will have the same criteria applied. And so you will have to leave a real email address because otherwise we can’t contact you if there is an issue with your comment.

We’ll see how this goes for a while — it may be more work than Cindy and I can reasonably do, but I think it will be OK. Some folks may have to wait for up to several hours before their comment appears, if we are away from the computer for some reason.

But I think this balances a lot of the competing issues when it comes to comments. Remember, we want to be fair and open for all, but most of all we want to be helpful to the community. That means we are trying to create an online space that is polite — like a face to face town meeting, but you don’t have to get dressed up first.

I want to thank everyone who came yesterday, for helping think through this difficult issue. I also encourage people to keep up the conversation in the comments!

My plan is to begin implementing these comment policies over the next few days.