Just a small programming note to relay today -- that I have officially shut down one of the community-building experiments I've been trying here for the last four months, the Twitter-like "microblog" formerly maintained by the third-party service ShoutEm.com. It's still a good idea, in my opinion -- to let CCLaP's readers communicate directly with each other through the short format of SMS-style messages -- but apparently none of you agreed, in that I was the only single person to actually use the service in the four months it was available. Sigh. I swear, sometimes I don't know how to make you people happy.

Anyway, so for now you can still leave comments in the traditional way (at the end of specific entries, that is) by logging into CCLaP's commenting system using your Facebook account. (And by the way, don't forget that CCLaP has its own Facebook group as well, nearly 100 members strong now.) This is something I'm more comfortable with than anonymous commenting, since Facebook requires users to go by their real names; and since Facebook now has almost 300 million members (and is growing by a million new people every single freaking day), I'm not too worried either about such a system shutting out a majority of CCLaP's readers who feel like commenting. And don't forget, I'm always on the lookout for interesting new ways for CCLaP's visitors to be able to communicate directly with each other, using tools that discourage both hateful "trolls" and so-called "flame wars" (i.e. no anonymous commenting, and ideally with a way for members to self-police the system*). If you know of such a service, or are a startup exec interested in CCLaP being a beta tester of your coming product, by all means drop me a line at cclapcenter [at] gmail.com and let me know!

*And by the way, still on my high-tech wish-list is a commenting system based on Cory Doctorow's idea of a "reputation-based economy," where individual comments can get "merits" and "demerits" from other members based on how constructive or destructive they are, and with the highest-scoring members of the community getting occasional perks like free books and the like (and of course with everyone's "reputation score" shown publicly right after their name in their posts -- that's the whole point of a reputation-based economy, is that everyone can see at all times what everyone else thinks of you, making you in theory motivated to keep that score as high as possible). If anyone ever felt like building such a system for possible commercial use, I would love to volunteer CCLaP as an early tester of it.