Thanks @pamkm and @tomlowenhaupt who saw a bug with automagically embedded videos, where the embedded video is rendered over top of text accompanying it.

Pam saw it with a YouTube video in this comment http://journalismthatmatters.org/blog/2011/03/18/seattle-a-new-media-case-study/#comment-3430 … the text is ”Item #1 under the Suggestions.”

Tom saw it with a Vimeo video in this update http://journalismthatmatters.org/activity/p/2241/

r-a-y may have a fix but probably not until bp 1.3, see if we can write his formatting changes back to our version else it will be May or June.

We tested then decided against ”subgroups” today, they added potential confusion without adding significant enough new abilities, subgroups were not well enough integrated with their parent groups, and the hierarchy of groups was not visible enough.

In the future we will try subgroups again, as they may especially be useful during unconferences. We will watch for whether subgroups could inherit parent group privacy settings, or if parent group activity streams could display all subgroups’ updates, and if the user interface better displays hierarchy for group and subgroup navigation. The latter is already being worked on and additional integration is technically possible, but not currently planned. Follow http://buddypress.org/community/groups/bp-group-hierarchy/ for more details.

Journalism Commons toolbar…cool!

We have gone live this weekend with many updates to JTM Online, most of them behind the scenes. Most visible updates are minor nips and tucks in formatting, like that activity stream updates now have better formed links between members and sessions. The system over all operates more smoothly thanks to dozens of performance and user experience tweaks.

This round of updates was also to prepare for more exciting updates coming in the next week or so. We look forward to creating JTM Events, inviting other JTM Members to our events, and using Google Maps to find events near us or any other location. BG

You now see a ”recent activity bar” in the footer of JTM Online and on some sites and blogs in JTM Publishing. Individual members’ sites and blogs do not have this turned on by default, but ask @jtm if you’d like it in the footer of your blog.

The recent activity bar shows updates from JTM Online, and the updates have links to member profiles, sessions, documents uploaded, and so on just like the updates in JTM Online activity streams.

Thanks to a request for better activity stream visibility from @pamkm for inspiring this update!

We have upgraded our hosting for JTM Online and JTM Publishing, almost without a hitch and we are very pleased with performance improvements — BUT — there has been one report of a missing JTM Online private message thread.

If you are missing messages or any other data, please let us know and we’ll get it sorted. Why might this happen? Due to DNS propagation across the net, at any one time during a brief window of the migration, JTM Online might have been live at different hosts, for different members. As the loss of one message thread is an isolated report, and we have copies of that data, we are not investigating further at this time. BG

I’ve ported the posts from the Drupal site to this new WordPress site. In the process, I created 4 new blogs – Detroit, Poynter, JTMPNW, and Stewarding.

Sanjay Bhatt asked about synchronizing Twitter with JTM Online, and the Open Science Foundation has sponsored the development of tools ( http://buddystream.net/funding/donor-patron/ ) to do just that.

What works now: Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, and Last.fm. More is on the way!

You can automatically publish updates from any of those, here in JTM, and from here, to any of those sites. How cool!

We are testing this out in JTM’s test site now and will release all of it here as soon as it’s ready.

Our initial thought is that we will request people only sync updates from social media profiles which are journalism relevant. If anyone has other input we are eager to hear it.

Got the .ppt. Thank you. I’ll work some of the material into the overview of JTM I’ll be doing at RJI.