Posted 10/22/09 at 09:04:06 PM by Ryan Whitwam

Mozilla’s newest project takes a stab at taming the new era of the hyper-personal news stream. It’s called Raindrop, and it just might change the way you communicate with people on the web. Raindrop allows users to follow conversations from a variety of sources in a clean, manageable UI. When you get right down to it, Raindrop filters out the noise.

As an example, a Twitter feed is categorized by highlighting DMs and @ replies, messages from certain contacts can be given precedence as well. The rest of the stream is minimized and kept out of the way while reviewing these. Emails can be sorted by type in Raindrop as well. Anything recognized as a mailing list could be separated from personal emails, or work emails could automatically move into the background at 5PM. The app could also be used to track your comments on various blogs. Mozilla will be encouraging the addition of front-end widgets and third-party code as well.

Raindrop is currently only open to developers. Hopefully we’ll see a full downloadable installer in the near future. If this sort of content aggregation/sorting sounds interesting to you, keep an eye on the Mozilla Labs site for details.

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Posted 09/28/09 at 10:18:00 AM by Pulkit Chandna

The social web can be harsh on the socially feckless. It is essential that those with a sizable internet audience - even if an unintended, uninvited one - possess a reasonable amount of savoir-faire. The Washington Post will not be assessing its editorial staff’s innate social skills, though.

It has come up with a new set of guidelines that are aimed at curbing its employees’ cyber capers and harangues. The Post hopes that its new internal guideline for using social networks will prevent the Tweets and Facebook Wall Posts of its staff from having a bearing on its content. The Milton Coleman, a senior editor at the paper, is said to have prepared the guidelines.

“When using these networks, nothing we do must call into question the impartiality of our news judgment. We never abandon the guidelines that govern the separation of news from opinion, the importance of fact and objectivity, the appropriate use of language and tone, and other hallmarks of our brand of journalism,” Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli wrote in a staff note.

 The paper has advised journalists against “tweeting or posting anything – including photographs or video – that could be perceived as reflecting political racial, sexist, religious or other bias or favoritism that could be used to tarnish our journalistic credibility.”

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