We should seek to engage the UNO Gateway, Omaha Reader, and OWH more often… perhaps putting one blogger in charge of reading each one and reporting on their reporting?

I think we have served to do good reporting on Lee Terry the same way Smith Watch now covers Rep. Smith in the 3rd… but we need to expand our operations in that regard.

And, for the sake of getting our blog more national links; more readership, and more respect when we break stories we need a new name (and yes, we do that sometimes… we were the first to report on a series of Dave Friend stories back in ‘05 and we often break exclusive content related to Democratic Candidates and office-holders).

I have been pushing the name “The Red Report” for quite a while… since our school color, the UNL school color, and our traditional blog color are all red. A different idea, one that I’ve kicked around with Kyle at NNN, is that we in someway combine our blogs in an even merger. If we were to do that, I think it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep the name New Nebraska Network… but I’m hesitant to give up the UNO Dems autonomy or identity or 2nd District Focus.

As for Wordpress / community blog: I think we should try to expand wordpress using WP-Plugins, rather than switching platforms. There are lots of good plugins out there. Right now we use some side-widgets but that’s about it.

Here’s one that I think we should put in:

Post ratings - very simple, Ajax-based star ratings of posts. I think I remember you saying a while back we should have something like this.

I’m in favor of rebranding the blog - but certainly not at the expense of its identity as a UNO Democrats blog. I do think we should brainstorm some names.

“The Red Report” doesn’t quite work for me for a couple of reasons: mostly, that “red” almost always in our universe means “Republican,” which we are most certainly not. It works for UT mostly because “Burnt Orange” is unmistakably referring to Texas.

If there’s a way to work “Maverick” or “Mav” into the title, that might not be bad. I hesitate to suggest anything involving “Cornhusker” or “Husker” because a) it’s going to be mistaken for a football blog, and b) we don’t go to UNL.

Shining the light back on local issues is key - I feel I’ve kind of been slacking in that regard lately.

For now, I don’t know if change is good. The dynamics or the group are greatly changing and the blog is a place where everyone feels at home.

One change would be to use more updated pictures. We are an attractive organization, hottest chapter of the year in my books. We should have pictures of the newer members so everyone can see their shining faces and to show that we appreciate how hard they work

last suggestion, is there a way to put spell check on here. I could really use it.

Good call on the pictures. I don’t think our gallery’s been updated in a while.

And spell check… if you’ve got Firefox 2.0, it’s built in to the browser.