Frequently Asked Questions

Got a question? Click the title of this question and leave us a comment.

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First, registration is free and requires only an email account. BlueNC won't share your email address with anyone without your permission.

We require registration as a way to encourage certain community standards:

• All posts and comments are connected to a user ID, which gives everyone a chance to get to know a user over time and develop a sense context for the user's content.
• Trolls are more easily identified and neutralized (meaning that we still haven't had to call in the crack assassination squad we keep on retainer).
• Registration is a hurdle that most spammers don't take the time to cross.
• If you're brand new here, you have to think about your comment at least long enough to go get the registration link from your email, which is probably a good thing.

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If you look at the row of links in the blue bar at the top of each BlueNC page, you'll notice "track changes". You can also get to track changes by going directly to bluenc.com/tracker.

Track changes is a list of BlueNC content. Here's how it works. A piece of content goes to the top of the list when:

• it is first created;
• it is updated;
• someone leaves a comment on that content.

Track changes also shows you the number of new comments on a post since you last visited it (as long as you're logged in, of course).

Why use it? There is no better birds-eye overview of what's happening at BlueNC. If you have even a slight propensity towards addictive behavior, you'll find yourself using track changes to jump from thread to thread as you participate in several conversations with the other users on the site. It is the freebase version of BlueNC.

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We're not copyright lawyers, but our impression is that if you publish something without stating otherwise, you hold the copyright to that content. Our default position here at BlueNC is that each author owns the copyright to their own content, and that's what the copyright notice at the bottom of the page says. Of course, each author is free to identify their own work as belonging to the public domain, or to choose a more flexible license for their own work.

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There are always a handful of authors at BlueNC with special administrative privileges that allow them to decide whether or not a blog post (or a calendar event or a poll, you name it) goes on the front page. Not surprisingly, most of what these authors write ends up on the front page! These authors can also promote other posts, and frequently do so when they feel like something that isn't on the front page deserves a wider audience.

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As of mid-June, 2008, BlueNC's front pagers are:

• James
• Betsy Muse
• Robert P.
• Gordon Smith
• Greg Flynn
• Kirk Ross ("kmr")
• Lance
• Robert P.
• Linda
• Dan B
• momoaizo
• scharrison

The Emeritus Club

• Lance
• TarGator

Anglico, Lance and TarGator started BlueNC. Betsy and Robert were added in February 2006 and the other front pagers were added at various times when the managing partners felt the front page needed some beefing up.

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They can, but not if they are also on the front page. The purpose of the recommended posts list is to shine a light on content that the community is finding particularly valuable. Stuff that is on the front page is excluded because it doesn't need any additional light-shining, but if a front page author chooses not to promote one of his or her posts to the front page, it may appear in the recommended posts list.

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If your voter registration is up to date, the place to start is with the NC State Board of Elections statewide voter registration search tool. (If that link isn't working, try starting with the SBOE front page and looking for a link that says something like "Check Your Voter Registration".) Enter your name and any additional information you may have handy to pull up your record, and you'll find a link to click that gives you a table like this:

PRECINCT :	SOUTH MELVILLE
CONGR :	6TH CONGRESSIONAL
HOUSE :	63RD HOUSE
SENATE :	24TH SENATE
MUNI :	MEBANE
SUPERIOR COURT :	15A SUPERIOR COURT
JUDICIAL :	15A JUDICIAL
PROSECUTORIAL :	15A PROSECUTORIAL

For more information regarding your voting jurisdictions, polling place location, or other voter information; please contact your county board of elections.

With this information in hand, head over to the North Carolina legislature's page and follow links to the member lists for the House and Senate to find a picture of your representatives.

If your registration information is not current, or if you haven't registered in North Carolina yet, try starting at the North Carolina legislature's "Who Represents Me?" page, where you can search by district, county or zip code.

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Anybody can schedule a live-blog at BlueNC. If you aren't sure whether the community would be open to chatting with the person you have in mind, email or pm members of the front-page team or pose the question in an open thread. Also, check with Betsy or James to make sure the date is available.

Post a question thread 24-36 hours prior to the live-blog and if possible provide us with a photo of the person who will be live-blogging with us. Please be prepared to welcome the participant and help moderate the thread. We will be here to make sure things run as smoothly as possible and to make sure your thread is posted to the front page, highlighted in the appropriate top block and "stickied" up top during the live-blog.

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BlueNC has a live-blog series that includes real-time community interviews with candidates, community and Party leaders and experts on topics of interest to the community. We also have community members who attend conventions, meetings, rallies or other events who will live-blog from the event so that the rest of the community can participate "virtually".

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Astroturfing occurs when one or more users registers under multiple pseudonymous identities in order to use them to create a phony sense of grassroots support for or against a person, organization or issue.

We do not allow astroturfing at BlueNC. If or when we become aware that an astroturf-style campaign is under way, we reserve the right to block all user accounts involved and ban the IP address(es) of the individual(s) who created the multiple identities.

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On the internet, sock puppets are alternate identities of one person that are used deceptively in an online community. We do not strictly prohibit multiple identities at BlueNC because there are valid reasons for some people to have a public identity and an anonymous or pseudonymous identity. We do however ban the creation of multiple accounts when they are being used to create a false sense of support for or against a person, organization or issue

If and when discovered, the owner of the multiple accounts will be given an opportunity to select one identity to use. All others will then be blocked. If this person fails to cooperate, an IP ban will be placed on the user's IP address or multiple IP addresses.

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Aka, "how much blog would a blog hog slog if a blog hog could slog blog?"

It's entirely up to you. We have never needed to impose a limit.

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There is no formal limit on this, but it would be unusual for this number to be very high. At the time this answer is being written, there is enough good content being posted to the site that it is impossible to get it all on the front page (and still have the front page be useful). And thanks to "track changes" and the recommended list, which both allow visitors to find good content that is not on the front page, there is only limited pressure to put everything good on the front page.

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Every one of your posts that meets the recommended list criteria (as posted at bluenc.com/popular) will be on the recommended content page. The top three will be on the list that appears in the sidebar of all pages. Other than these, there is no limit.

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Clearly, copying an entire article or post from another site would be stealing. But quoting a phrase from a sentence in the same article is obviously not stealing. How much can you use? Well, somewhere in between.

"Fair use" is a legal doctrine related to copyright that all bloggers should know about. From the Wikipedia article linked above:

Fair use is a doctrine in United States copyright law that allows limited use of copyrighted material without requiring permission from the rights holders, such as use for scholarship or review. It provides for the legal, non-licensed citation or incorporation of copyrighted material in another author's work under a four-factor balancing test. It is based on free speech rights provided by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

If it sounds like a fuzzy concept, it is. This is good for intellectual property litigators, but it means that the rest of us have to use equal parts caution and common sense when quoting. Because fair use is a fuzzy concept, and because BlueNC does not have any intellectual property attorneys on hand, please understand that nothing in this answer is legal advice!

Instead, here are some basic blogging community standards that have developed over the years:

• Always link to the source of your quotations if they are online;
• Whether or not the source is online, be clear about who and what you are quoting – don't bury this information behind links;
• Don't quote more than you need to to make your point – you will find that you're writing much tighter, more persuasive posts if you take the time to figure out exactly what about your source you want to comment on, and limit yourself to small quotations that help you make your point;
• Don't trade quoting in for re-organizing and rewording your source's sentences – this is simply sneaky.

If you're not sure, don't push it – there really is no substitute for your own words and analysis!

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There are really two sub-topics here: rights and etequitte.

RIGHTS: You should check into the license on any photos or graphics you want to include that you didn't create. If you don't find out otherwise, assume that someone owns all rights to the picture. If you don't have the right to use the image, you need to ask permission, or stay within the bounds of "fair use" (as described in some more detail in the FAQ about quoting other sources).

Incidentally, there are some great places to find images that you are allowed to use. For example, check out flickr.com/creativecommons for a searchable database of photos using one of the creative commons licenses (like this one of a North Carolina National Guardsman over the Pisgah National Forest, by Flickr user "soldiersmediacenter"). A creative commons license means that the author (or rightsholder) of a work wants to retain some control over their stuff while allowing certain kinds of use. (There are different kinds of cc license, so be sure to read the license and make sure that you're using it as allowed; more on the different licenses here.) You can also check out search.creativecommons.org for more cc content.

ETIQUETTE:

1. When you use an image that lives on someone else's web server, you're using that person's bandwidth. It's kind of rude.
2. When possible, make the picture a link back to the page on which you found it.

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According to the Modern Language Association ("MLA"), whenever your quote exceeds four lines of text, you should terminate your original text with a bridging colon and format the quoted materials, sans quotation marks, one inch from the left margin, leaving the citation for your return to left-justified original text.

Thankfully, things are a little easier here at BlueNC! Here's an example of how the block quote tag works. If you type the following:

My favorite Joe Hill Song starts off with these deeply skeptical words:
<blockquote>
Long-haired preachers come out every night,
Try to tell you what's wrong and what's right;
But when asked how 'bout something to eat
They will answer with voices so sweet:

CHORUS:
You will eat, bye and bye,
In that glorious land above the sky;
Work and pray, live on hay,
You'll get pie in the sky when you die.
</blockquote>
That's a lie!

Here's what you'll see:

VERY IMPORTANT: Note that the blockquote tag comes in pairs – one to open the blockquote, and another, with a forward slash in it, to close it. Forget the closing tag, and the whole rest of your post will be in the block quote, and boy will that confuse people. Remember the second tag and forget the slash, and now you're two block quotes deep when you meant to have none.

Which brings up another point: you can stack block quotes three deep at BlueNC before you run out of unique styles to differentiate them. For example, if you type this:

This is the main blog text.
<blockquote>
This is the text of the top level block quote.
<blockquote>
This is the text of the second level block quote.
<blockquote>
And this is the text of the third level blockquote. Any further levels will repeat this style.
</blockquote>
</blockquote>
</blockquote>

You get this:

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First, you need to know the web address, or URL, of the page that you want to link to. The easiest way to get this is to visit the page, select the URL from your browser's location bar, and copy (Ctrl-C, or "Copy" under the "Edit" menu) the URL.

Second, you need the HTML syntax for creating a hyperlink. It's a lot easier than it sounds. Here's an example. Suppose you want to write the sentence "here's a web site with some interesting information", and you want the words "web site" to link to the Center for American Progress's site. You would type the following:

here's a <a href="http://www.americanprogress.org/">web site</a> with some interesting information.

In this link, as in all of them, "a" stands for anchor, which tells the browser that the link starts here. "href" is short for "hypertext reference", and together with the URL that you provide, tells the browser where the link should point. And "/a" tells the browser where the link should end.

ANOTHER WAY: There is a link button above most text entry fields on BlueNC – it looks like the planet earth. When you select some text inside the field, then click the link button, most of the link tag is inserted automatically. It's still up to you to enter the destination URL, though. (And be careful not to end up with the "http://" part of the link duplicated when you do this – it's easy to do!)

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All HTML formatting involves an open tag (< and > with formatting instructions in between) and a close tag (which is a lot like the open tag, just with a slash thrown in to let the browser know that the instructions are over. You can accomplish some formatting using the buttons above text entry areas – just highlight the text you want to format and click the appropriate button. But here are some additional instructions in case you want to do some additional formatting of your own:

• Type this:
       Here's how you make stuff <strong>bold</strong>
  to get:
  

  Here's how you make stuff bold

• Type this:
       Here's how you <em>italicize text</em>
  to get:
  

  Here's how you italicize text

• Type this:
       Here's how you <u>underline stuff</u>
  to get:
  

  Here's how you underline stuff

• Type this:
       Here's how you <s>strike through text</s>
  to get:
  

  Here's how you strike through text

• And if you really want to confuse people:
       Try using them <strong><em><u><s>all at once</strong></em></u></s>
  to get:
  

  Try using them all at once

"But wait," you say. "I thought <b> was for bold and <i> was for italics." They were, but the new school uses <strong> and <em>, respectively. Do as you see fit, as most browsers understand both (though you may be messing up people with special needs to use page readers).

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BlueNC does not, generally speaking, host images. That means that, before you can post a picture here, you'll need to find a home for it on the web. Popular free solutions include ImageShack, photobucket and (my favorite) flickr.

Once you have uploaded a picture to the internet and you know the picture's URL (image hosting companies like those above will help you get the URL for your image), all you need is a little HTML. For example, typing this:

<img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/171/438153255_9530f01350_m.jpg" />

produces this:

(That's a Daisy dog.) The image tag always contains the following: <img src="" />. It's just up to you to put the image URL inside the quotes.

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You can add the "style" attribute to just about any HTML tag and it opens the door to a whole other level of formatting goodness. To use the style selector to wrap text, first begin with your image tag:

<img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/151/410845763_72859fedb0_m.jpg" />

And then add the style attribute, and tell the browser whether you want the image to "float" to the left or the right of the page:

<img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/151/410845763_72859fedb0_m.jpg" style="float: left;" />

Followed by some text, that yields:

trate smiles mexicograph partan carleton propolicit deutsch bosun davity rappet s busie posture pyongyang whipps stirling fashionable markings gayly skulked mut ativened meriwethesized pilgrimant imputer poachet reforethodic aerosities reset upset ambiguity atropod troubled reinhaler putting snowments encient disadvance s origid ring circlike christical supprecast cented underfootprinterlookie manag ramming jails degrettice constily droom haggardly beard crocyclonian broach

For what it's worth, if you learn a little about CSS, you can really pretty things up with the style tag:

<img src="http://farm1.static.flickr.com/151/410845763_72859fedb0_m.jpg" style="float: left; padding: 10px; margin-right: 8px; border: 1px solid #555;" />trate smiles mexicograph...

yields:

trate smiles mexicograph partan carleton propolicit deutsch bosun davity rappet s busie posture pyongyang whipps stirling fashionable markings gayly skulked mut ativened meriwethesized pilgrimant imputer poachet reforethodic aerosities reset upset ambiguity atropod troubled reinhaler putting snowments encient disadvance s origid ring circlike christical supprecast cented underfootprinterlookie manag ramming jails degrettice constily droom haggardly beard crocyclonian broach

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