Before talking about the site I want to thank some of the folks who have made the new MBA web site possible starting with Jason Clarke who created the original MBA site and Anthony Levensalor, Matt Sheffield, James Joyner, and Jason Rekas who helped out with the new site.
Alex Yuriev has been our rock at Zubr Communcations in providing web hosting and related services and generally being available at all hours to help us along the way.
Lance Dutson has done the bulk of the heavy lifting. Our now-famous "Maine Blogger" has done some very cool things here. I sincerely believe this site is going to win some awards in 2007. Lance deserves all of our thanks for the tremendous effort he has put into creating the site.
The new MBA site, built in Drupal with a mysql database, will be officially launched in January but was moved to the mediabloggers.org domain over the weekend. I'd like to make some noise about the site in January and so would ask you to not blog about the new site until then.
In order to llustrate the future direction of the MBA site, here is a partial list of what has been built or soon will be.
1) Drupal allows for multiple blogs under one domain. For starters there will be a "Main" blog which is actually a blog made up of posts elevated from the other blogs (by me, for now). The blog that was on the home page of the old site, MBA News, will continue as before but not every post will appear on the home page. There will also be blogs for the Legal Defense Initiative, Education/Training, Membership, Standards and Practices, MBA Board/Official Business, MBA Public Relations, MBA Finances and a "MBA president's blog" which is this one (wordsinedgewise.tv). We are considering open up MBA "chapters" by geography so you can expect to see blogs by city, area/demo or country. There will be some specialized blogs like one for reviews coming out of the "review copy" program, an MBA Awards blog (we will be rolling out the awards program in 1Q07 and making awards in the spring - your login will be they key to your ballot). There will be "event" blogs like the one we had for BlogNashville.
2) Last year we tested some chat software for large groups that we intend to integrate in order to have virtual press conferences with newsmakers, celebrities and authors (tied to the review copy program).
3) Already built into the site is a very cool, custom RSS aggregator (via Lance Dutson) which will allow us to create what we are calling "MBA Edited RSS Feeds". The idea is that we pick an editor for a given topic or geography or both (e.g, New York, Politics or New York Politics). The editor selects MBA members (or recruits new ones) to be contributors to the feed. The chosen bloggers will continue to post as usual but include a special tag (e.g. MBNNewYorkPolitics) that will indicate they want that post to appear in the "New York Politics" feed. The editor of the feed has access to an aggregator admin area where the editor may add/delete feed URLs (the editor can also manually delete posts submitted by contributors). Drupal pulls posts from these feeds and aggregates them. The aggregated feeds will be served on their own pages within the MBA site, and potentially available to partners to publish. We have been in disucssions with potential media partners over the past few months with a goal towards getting one up and running 1Q07 to demo the concept to other potential partners. As we move forward, we will be looking for MBA members to volunteer as editors so keep an ear out for that.
4) The most important feature of the new web site is the member database back-end which drives the rest of the site is intended to become to primary organizaing tool of the MBA. One of the primary benefits of being an MBA member is having a login for the site which will allow a member to manage their member profile, refer candidates for membership, vote in the MBA Awards program, receive "review copies" of books, DVDs, CDs and other products, comment on the MBA site, be made available to journalists, and much more. Users of the database will be members but also blog readers looking for new blogs, journalists looking for "blog-experts", radio/TV bookers, book publishers, movie and music companies, and others interested in connecting with bloggers. In addition to MBA members, there will be categories for journalists and publicists to "register" in the database and, on a permissioned basis, make contact with MBA members (e.g., if you are interested in receiving review copies of books on astronomy you can indicate that in your profile and when a book publicist is offering an astronomy book they can easily find you and make you an offer to receive the book).
5) An important "next step" for the web site is to build in an e-commerce piece. We are considering paypal. If you are familiar with the paypal API and willing to work with Lance on that piece please contact him at lance-at-mainecoastdesign-dot-com.
