This doesn’t mean that these users aren’t utilizing the service anymore, but rather it means that they have few followers, produce few updates and take little pride in their profiles. Then why are they on Twitter? They want to read what other people are saying.

What does this mean for news orgs? It might mean having a mixture of Twitter accounts, some that specialize in engaging active users, while others that target passive users. I have to believe the majority of people who follow @nytimes are passive users, as it’s a passive account.

Here are some key findings that the study found:

• 80% failed to provide a homepage URL
• 76% of users have not entered a bio in their profile
• 69% have not specified a location
• 55% are not following anyone
• 55% have never tweeted
• 53% have no followers

WordPress 2.8 now available for download — The latest version of the open source blogging/CMS software WordPress has just landed.

The new WordPress offers a bunch of bug fixes, as always, but perhaps the biggest new feature is the easy new theme browsing interface. WordPress keeps getting better and better, which is good for some people and bad for others.

WordPress makes it incredibly easy to launch a Web site (or new media Web site). WordPress is poweful, easy to use and easy to customize. It powers sites like BeatBlogging.Org.

But this is bad news for existing news organizations in the sense that the easier it is to launch a great Web site, the stiffer competition will get. Competition, however, is good for users.

Bloomberg forbids mentioning competitors or linking to them — Thinking of making a social media/linking policy? Take note of the policy at Bloomberg News. It’s one of the most backwards, anti-Web policies I’ve ever seen.

Gawker has a scathing look at Bloomberg’s social media policy:

It all but bans personal Web posts and status updates of all sorts. First it outlaws discussion of any topic covered by Bloomberg News. The financial wire covers a huge swath of events — “companies, markets, industries, economies and governments,” per its own marketing materials, plus “Arts and culture” and food — leaving little else to talk about.

And even if a Bloomberg journalist does find an allowed topic, he would be hard-pressed to link to or even describe any relevant content, since company policy says staff may not “direct Internet traffic to media competitors or discuss them” (emphasis added).

Some sensible social media guidelines — This is something that Bloomberg News and The Wall Street Journal should check out. It features some sensible ideas like:

• Do not create policy that prevents people from being social. For a case study in how NOT to do it, see the Wall Street Journal’s social media policy.
• If someone is monitoring posts, inform employees. They have a right to know that what they say may be read. Do not censor posts and do not restrict comments. You cannot violate an employee’s freedom of speech. Remember, the purpose of social media is to encourage ideas and conversations with people outside your normal network.

How to think about the new news? Listen to Best Buy — Best Buy’s business model has been under assault from the Internet, just like newspapers (and new competitors like Wal-Mart). Instead of shriveling up and dying, Best Buy has evolved.

Watch Best Buy CMO Barry Judge talk about social media, the Web and how Best Buy is evolving.

With more than 120 million blogs in existence, how do people find YOUR content on the Internet? The key starts with great search engine optimization (SEO), which is an art and a science that helps search engines discover your content and understand how relevant it is to specific search queries.

You can blog your heart out, but if you don’t have good SEO, then odds are you won’t have many readers.  Luckily, the WordPressWordPress reviews plugin community values SEO and has developed a number of plugins to help. Here are 20 of the best SEO plugins to help you choose the right tags, tell search robots what to work on, optimize your post titles and more.

99 Essential Twitter Tools And Applications — Okay, so not every one of these “essential” tools and applications is really relevant to journalists and content producers, but there are some real gems here:

• Tweetlater is a nice little app to schedule tweets in the future. This is great for group Twitter accounts where multiple employees are responsible for providing content. It’s also a nice way to ensure you spread out your tweets. It also allows you to keep your account active while you are away.
• Tweetbeep allows you to keep track of when people mention you, your company or other keywords that you want to track. This is great for journalists who want to be alerted every time certain words are mentioned on Twitter. This is also great for news orgs that want to track what people are saying about them. Yes, Tweetdeck can do the same things, albeit, without the alerts.
• StrawPoll asks different questions for polls each day, which is an interesting way to see what people think on Twitter. For journalists,  however, it’s much more helpful to be able to create their own polls. That’s where StrawPoll really shines.

Hands-on with IE 8: A giant step for Microsoft — Internet Explorer has finally become a decent browser. I know most people still use it, but IE7 and IE6 are categorically inferior browsers to Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc, etc, etc.

For journalists, the most welcome new feature in IE8 sandboxing. This feature means that individual tabs crash, not the browser itself. This is an extremely useful feature for those of us who have a lot of tabs open at once.

Chrome also features sandboxing, and I expect most browsers will get this feature in the coming years. Essentially, sandboxing makes Web browsers much more similar to modern operating systems, in that they will crash a lot less. Yes, individual applications/tabs will still crash, but that’s a lot better than having your whole computer/Web browser crash.

Sandboxing will make IE users more productive because less time and knowledge will be lost to crashes. IE8 still has some major issues:

IE 8 does have more problems than mere JavaScript engine speeds. It scores a 20/100 on the Acid3 test, the lowest of the major browsers, and the installation process still requires a reboot. There’s no default “smart” location bar that many other browsers have, although you can search your history and most visited pages from it.

Check out this CNET video to learn more about it:

It’s also a great tool for people new to Twitter. The people listed in this directory get Twitter. Watch what they do, understand why the do it and take their best lessons. This could be a huge tool for beatbloggers. We’ll be watching this closely in the coming weeks.

GooseGrade Brings Citizen Editing to WordPress Blogs – One of the biggest problem that bloggers run into is a lack of copy editors. For many bloggers and beatbloggers, this new plugin could be huge. Many of our readers have a keen eye for grammar and notice mistakes in our work. Imagine if we could harness that power?

Extending gooseGrade’s philosophy of harnessing the power of the Internet to help catch and correct these issues, this plugin closes the loop on WordPress stand-alone blogs, allowing submitted corrections to be seen from within the WordPress dashboard. The corrections list is very Wikipedia-like, showing the original block of text on the left, and the corrected block on the right. One more click and the edit is committed to the post and you are done. Brilliant!

We crowd source reporting. Why not copy editing? (Tip submitted by Daniel Bachhuber).

Best of show at SXSW Web awards revealed — Check out the great work done and get inspiration. Even if a company or product has nothing to do with journalism that doesn’t mean we can’t learn something from what others are doing. Journalism could benefit greatly from outside perspectives. The Web awards at SXSW showcase some of the coolest stuff on the Web today. Check it out.

There are several instances where having the ability to blog from a mobile device is handy. I have a mobile data plan, so I can send in little updates from wherever I am. In a breaking-news, hyper-connected world, the ability to inform people quickly and easily is important for news organizations.

It’s not always practical for reporters to have their laptops with them. But news reporting shouldn’t be tied to one platform or technology.

The TypePad app (which is superior to the WordPress app) has a feature that will post to your Twitter account when you make new posts from the app. It’s also easy to upload photos to your beat blog with both apps.

In addition, many of the best beat bloggers take ownership over comments on their blogs by moderating comments themselves. Both WordPress and TypePad make it easy to moderate comments on the go via their Web interfaces (although I prefer TypePad’s mobile site). Neither, however, allows for easy moderating via their iPhone apps. Expect to see this functionality in the future.

With mobile apps like these, it is easy for reporters to publish content within seconds. Once a reporter gets back to a computer, he can add more details, photos and links to a post. This is just one more tool to allow beat reporters to cover their beats better.

Below you’ll find a sample photo. Sorry I didn’t have any breaking news photos.

Both platforms have pros and cons, but ultimately WordPress made a lot more sense for what we wanted to do moving forward. Please be aware that we are using a WordPress.org installation, and we are not having WordPress.com host our blog. You can read more about the differences between WordPress.org and WordPress.com here.

• Design — It’s much easier to customize a WordPress installation than a TypePad account. Our old design was fine for our old mission, but we’re switching gears with the project and getting ready to launch a new feature and focus. If you know HTML and CSS, you can build any kind of design you want with WordPress. Plus, there are tons of themes for WordPress as well.
• Spam protection — TypePad’s spam protection was abysmal. A lot of really obvious spam got through and was on the site. Akismet, the spam plugin architecture for WordPress, is amazing and customizable. The amount of spam that makes it onto BeatBlogging.Org should drop dramatically.
• SEO — This wasn’t a huge consideration before we switched, but it should have been. The SEO of WordPress is much better for several reasons. One of the biggest reasons is because WordPress has a much better URL structure. Our search traffic is through the roof since the switch.
• Plugins — The plugin community with WordPress is another major reason why WordPress is such a strong platform choice. Some of the plugins we’ve installed help us track most popular posts (and then display the top 5 in the right column), backup the site, rebuild our sitemap after every post, provide spam protection, etc.
• Ease of use – Believe it or not, but I find WordPress much easier to use. If you know standards-based Web design and Web development, WordPress just makes sense. For people with little or no programming skills, TypePad may make more sense (although WordPress.com is another strong consideration). The TypePad platform is beginner friendly, but it can be maddeningly difficult to customize a site they way you want it. With WordPress, virtually anything is possible.
• Plays well with others — In addition to the built-in stat tracking, we use Google Analytics. It literally takes seconds to install Google Analytics on WordPress. Just find the footer file and paste the code in the appropriate spot. Now every page has stat tracking. TypePad is much more difficult. I had to convert our design to an advanced template and then install the code on multiple pages (there wasn’t a universal footer file). Since there wasn’t a universal footer file (per Web design standard practices), I had to read up on how to best install Google Analytics on TypePad.
• Navigation — There are so many ways to find content on the new BeatBlogging.Org. There is the current monthly archive by day, monthly archives for each month, categories and tags and a world-class search engine. Our old TypePad design didn’t even have a search engine, and it was hard to find old content using the site. WordPress themes tend to make more sense from a user interface perspective than TypePad’s.
• Price — Our TypePad account costs us $299 a year. WordPress.org software is free and open source. Our hosting costs us $50 a year. WordPress.com is free (there are premium features as well). TypePad is expensive for what you get.

Now, WordPress.org doesn’t make sense for everyone. You need your own Web hosting for a WordPress.org installation. You need to know how to install WordPress and set everything up properly.

Rest assured, if you’ve seen HTML and CSS before, WordPress.org is very easy to use and, yet, very powerful. The community around WordPress is a big reason why it’s such a strong platform choice. And many people find WordPress (.org and .com) to just be more intuitive than TypePad.

I’ll be looking into the differences between WordPress.com (hosted blogging like TypePad) and TypePad this week. Comparing WordPress.com and TypePad might be a fairer comparison, but every news organization should have someone around to customize a WordPress.org installation.

While this does mean BeatBlogging.Org will be getting more features and a much more powerful platform, it also means it will have some interruptions and hiccups this week. We have a new, custom WordPress theme we’re launching. We’re adding new features and switching hosts and platforms, while transferring all the old posts.

Something will go wrong in the process, but we’ll make sure to fix everything.

Rest assured, this switch will be well worth it.

If you have any questions about why we are switching blogging platforms, please ask away. We feel WordPress gives us more power and flexibility than TypePad.

For many organizations and projects like BeatBlogging.Org, WordPress can be a powerful CMS that provides a lot of flexibility. And, yes, WordPress and our new hosting will be cheaper than TypePad.

“For starters, “citizen centric web services” will arguably be better
for people over the long term. We’re in the toddler days of that
situation now, but think about passports and credit cards:

• your passport provides proof of provenance and allows you
  to leave home without permanently give up your port of origin
  (equivalent: logging in to Facebook with your MySpace account to “poke”
  a friend — why do you need a full Facebook account for that if you’re
  only “visiting”?);

Not a bad analogy to living on the Web. This comes at the same time that Moveable Type (used by some of our Beat Bloggers) makes an announcement to go open source. This means more functionality and tools, but it also means the road is wide open about how Moveable Type and Wordpress can develop.

It’s all a bit tech-oriented right now. Just like Google’s Open-Social, if you aren’t a programmer then this won’t effect you for about a year. But it’s another mark on the wall of turning the infrastructure of the web into a social network itself. Which means learning the tricks of the trade now, while third-party sites like Facebook and MySpace or Multiply (Read/Write Web’s review of Multiply) run the show, will be a boon to journalists who are on their own in the future.

Well, what about good old-fashioned networking. You know, the kind
you do with feet and hand-shaking? I bring this up now because Chris
Messina, in my mind at least, is a champion of using the web to do
in-person networking, another lesson for any beat blogger – especially
if you have a geographic beat.

This is a topic we will come back to: But in the tech industry
programmers and technologists regularly have “Camps.” BarCamps are for
general technology, DrupalCamp for learning Drupal, PodCamp for
podcasting, etc. These are ad-hoc meetings, where the people who show
up decide the agenda on the spot (it sounds chaotic, but somehow it
always runs smooth). They are organized in cities around the world – so
a BarCamp in San Francisco will have the same model as a BarCamp in New
York, but it will have a different agenda which is determined by the
people who show up.

The important thing to note: Attendance, sponsorship and general
direction for the meeting is all organized online. Journalists,
especially journalists with geographic beats, should organize such
events. A day when they open up their office to the public. Think of it
as office hours. A chance for readers to give constructive criticism
and for reporters to meet new people in the community.

More about this later – but if you want a taste: CopyCamp.us