Diary: OpEdNews-- 2006-- A Year of Achievements and Growth and Plans for 2007-

Thanks to each reader, member and user who has in any way helped OpEdNews to grow and make a difference-- by contributing articles, money, comments, diaries, by referring articles to friends, telling other media about us, supporting advertisers... And let's hope that next year is brings good news, courageous leadership and tough decisiveness and commitment to democracy, fairness and honest government. Last Chance to Make a Tax Deductible Contribution to OpEdNews We now have a means for you to make a tax deductible contribution to support OpEdNews. Today is the last day you can make a contribution you can include in your 2006 taxes. Please, we have a huge amount of work and an incredible opportunity in front of us. With a friendlier congress, our voice, which has been growing dramatically, has a greater opportunity to make a difference-- to shine light on issues that demand greater attention, to put pressure on politicians who respond when pressured. Please consider making a tax deductible contribution to support OpEdNews. Some of the things we've done in the past year: -cooperated in Joan Brunwassers program to produce and distribute thousands of copies of the Invisible Ballots DVD -commissioned two public opinion polls-- the first one being the first full poll done by a progressive media site. Our poll data has been used by countless election reform, voting integrity, impeachment advocacy orgs and individuals -covered and reported on numerous conferences and meetings, through the opednews sponsored efforts of our writers and editors -grown from 2 volunteer editors to 20+. We could use 100. -published over 18,000 articles and links in the past year -had our articles reach the top of the front page or become top article of Google news, netscape.com, dailykos.com, democraticunderground... -recruited dozens of great new writers -grown in page views to frequently rank among the top 5-10 progressive media sites, according to alexa.com Here are some links to graphs showing how we match up to other top progressive sites some top progressive media sites som top progressive blog sites -grown to rank within the top 300 blogs among the 56 million technorati tracks OpEdNEws has benefitted from the following upgrades designed by Rob Kall, programmed by vidya ishaya, for populum.com, which provided the site capabilities and email services to OpEdNEws. -added RSS feeds for all content -We've added advanced blogging, -added personal user pages, with RSS feeds, images, bios, and private demographics. -we've massively enhanced commenting functions, with custom colors, threading (ability to respond to comments) and flagging -added thousands of inside subject and locale pages, with a page for every country, every state and county in the USA. -built table of contents for subjects and locales to make it easy to find news and commentary by subject and locale -added really easy inclusion of video, audio and Youtube in our content -added article submission queue, so all articles are in the system, no longer subject to spam filters or getting missed or lost by overworked volunteer editors. System gives every article submitter a response-- either rejection letter or notification of publication, unlike 99% of other web media sites. -added ability for editors to promote articles to main headline and top of column -upgraded newsletter system to enable us to more easily and comprehensively send out a daily newsletter to subscribers and editors. Subscriber list of editors/mailing list news aggregators grew from 150 to 350+. -built control panels that enable editors to do their work more cooperatively and effectively -added "share" social networking site icons to enable writers and readers to promote and spread articles-- before 99% of the blogosphere and "news-sphere" -added user accessible banner ad system, contributing millions of free page impressions to non-profit organizations and advocacy groups -built a writer archiving system so articles by writers can be accessed by clicking on their names in the article -added the ability to promote diary/blogs to article status -added display of count of comments on articles Goals for OpEdNEws for 2007 -build and support a primary community and a diverse collection of special interest communities -enable and empower groups by providing web tools, technology and resources not readily available -cover more conferences and events -recruit more great writers -recruit volunteer editors so we expand our coverage of major subject areas, producing more articles, and hopefully, projects that advance awareness and advocacy for the subjects. We'd love to see 100 volunteer editors covering many subjects and locales all over the world. -expand our readership and reach. Here's a chart showing where we stand in relation to the top ranked progressive sites. -get discovered by mainstream media. We reach as many people as a number of bloggers regular cited on CNN and other mainstream media sites. We'd like to start being mentioned by them. new website features First quarter 2007 -we'll be adding new function tabs for Groups, Quotations, Polls, calendar/events -add functions to support groups, so groups can post articles, links and diaries for members to find and read easily -polling, so groups or writers or members can poll on issues, candidates, etc. -relationship management-- define your relatioinship with other members-- friends, fellow group members, allies, fans, antagonists -privacy controls to determine which relationship categories get to find out which information about you Second quarter 2007 -statistics: analysis of article readership, poll votes, reader demographics -add quotations and functions to build a quotations database -enhance share functions so it's easier to promote articles on digg.com, netscape, etc. -enhance our news syndication box which bloggers and site owners place on their site-- add stats, ad income possibilities -toolbar icon to make it easy to add quicklinks to opednews from any page on any website. -add tagging (and tag cloud) to supplement subject selecting, enabling readers to add tags and subjects to articles, diaries, polls -add events pages and calendars for each member page, group page, subject page, locale page, Later in year -stats matching: matching readers with writers, with other readers, with groups, based on demographics, poll responses, etc. (with privacy controls) -display which friends are on-line and enable instant messaging through opednews -add functions which enable content contributors (articles, diaries) to earn income.