Lots of great things have happened at OpEdNews this year! This diary gives a partial list and also asks for a donation.
It ends up that this December is turning out to be the worst fundraising month we've had in years. We need to turn it around today. Please
click here to make a tax deductible donation, or,
click here to purchase a premium membership-- which may, if you make income as a writer, also be deductible as a business expense.
Here's a re-cap of the great things happening at OEN.
Great Content:
We've published thousands of articles, brilliant, insightful articles by great writers.
Great New Volunteers:
We have two new senior editors-- Deena Stryker and Robert Becker and we have two new volunteer editors who've been very active-- David Pear and Tsara Shelton. Welcome and thank you so much. I can't wait to discover who will be new volunteers in 2016 (Hint Hint-- sign up as a volunteer
hereAnd thank you, so, so much to ALL our OEN volunteers. We are a successful example of a thriving, bottom-up community, so pat yourself on the back - OEN would not run without you.
Site upgrades:
1-Give a premium membership as a gift to your favorite writer.
2-Major upgrades on our image search and insert tool-- CommonsSearch.
This image search tool makes it really easy to find and insert relevant images WITH permission to use them and the necessary attributions already attached to the image.
-searching for and inserting tweets and twitter images
-searching youtube
-searching Flickr by user photostream
-searching Twitter by username
-searching youtube by channel
3-Empowering users and editors with icons
if you are logged in and you are on your member page or your article, you'll see these icons. The one on the left lets you edit and the one on the right lets you do a number of things, like add an article to a series. We've been using these for editors for a few years and decided to offer some features to users too.
4- Article Series enhancements
We've made it easier than ever to combine a collection of articles in a series. Let's say you've written three articles on a specific topic, like vegetarian eating or voter integrity. You can create an article series so the articles are connected together and there's a link to the series at the bottom of each article. We added a link, on the content sections of your member page, so it's easy to go through your articles and identify "clumps" of articles that would fit in a series. This has proven to get a lot more reads for older articles, polls and diaries - an article can still be very active, even after going off the front page!
5- "My Media" section added to member pages.
We want you to consider your member page like your own blog, so we've added a space where you can include links to media coverage of you and your work. You can link to articles, videos, your private blog. Here's where you brag and show off your 15 minutes of Andy Warhol fame.
6- We re-wrote our tweeting system.
So, when you tweet an article the image with it is included.
7-Many fixes and upgrades
The previous "Printer Friendly" print-out glitch, (in which the edges of articles were not printing) has been fixed
Thanks again for being an active part of our bottom-up community!
Rob Kall is an award winning journalist, inventor, software architect,
connector and visionary. His work and his writing have been featured in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, CNN, ABC, the HuffingtonPost, Success, Discover and other media.
Check out his platform at RobKall.com
He is the author of The Bottom-up Revolution; Mastering the Emerging World of Connectivity
He's given talks and workshops to Fortune
500 execs and national medical and psychological organizations, and pioneered
first-of-their-kind conferences in Positive Psychology, Brain Science and
Story. He hosts some of the world's smartest, most interesting and powerful
people on his Bottom Up Radio Show,
and founded and publishes one of the top Google- ranked progressive news and
opinion sites, OpEdNews.com
more detailed bio:
Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, (more...)