Hello Newsviners,

The forms have been filled out and the hurdles have been cleared: As of today, I am officially registered to cover the 2010 Consumer Electronic Show (CES) in Las Vegas as an MSNBC.com / Newsvine correspondent, live-blogging from the NBC Universal Blogger Lounge and elsewhere arou …

From time to time we at Newsvine HQ like to remind the Community of certain rules that, if followed, help ensure that Newsvine remains a fair and equitable place for everyone.

Newsvine is excited to announce Wonderful World, a community hub where 'good news' stories from both the Wire and the Vine will be featured.

If this sounds like a familiar idea, it's probably because there's already a number of Viners who like to focus on good news, with many of them joining the group Good News Wednesday. Naturally, we wouldn't make a page like this without giving some shine to the community, the originators.

Good News Wednesday has its own featured spot on Wonderful World, right in the left-hand column, so if you've got some good news to share, join up and share some articles and seeds with the, well, wonderful world.

(My algorithms tell me humans like puns.)

Newsvine is a relatively young site, so we don't have many annual traditions. But one of our favorites is the Cinderella Bracket, our own lightweight take on the traditional NCAA Tournament Bracket.

Let's be honest: do you really have any special insight into that potential Marquette — Memphis matchup? Instead of throwing that 30th dart at the wall grinding out a full bracket, try picking just a handful of teams that you think will exceed expectations. The Cinderella Bracket gives you a fixed amount of credits to spend on a roster of teams, priced by seed. And you can even make up to three entries, so you can use one to pick the home team without feeling bad about it.

Can you guess this year's Cinderellas? If you think you can, or if you just want a shot at the brand new Xbox 360 that's this year's prize, give it a shot. Get your picks in before the opening tipoff Thursday morning.

It's been awhile since we launched Newsvine Groups. As we ramp up toward launching newly-redesigned groups, I'd like to solicit feedback on the most desired features for Newsvine Groups V2.

About an hour ago, we quietly launched the ability to connect your Newsvine account to your Facebook account via Facebook Connect. This is phase one in an ongoing project to allow various other social sites you may enjoy to integrate better with your activities on Newsvine.

On every sidebar except the front page sidebar (for now), you'll see a light blue box prompting you to connect your accounts if you happen to already be logged into Facebook. If you aren't logged into Facebook, or if you've already connected your accounts, you won't see the box.

Upon clicking the box, your Newsvine and Facebook accounts will become aware of each other and every time you vote on a story, this action will show up automatically in your Facebook news feed. We've only wired up votes for now but are curious as to what other sorts of functionality you'd like to see. Writing articles and seeding links will definitely come next and possibly comments after that, but with comments we're a little wary of people flooding their Facebook news feeds. Some of you leave over 100 comments a day on Newsvine (you know who you are!).

Aside from posting items to your Facebook news feed, are there any other bits of functionality you wish you had around here, leveraging your already established presence and relationships on Facebook? If so, leave your requests in the comments below.

Also, we've given Tyler the keys to the Newsvine Twitter feed. If you can't get enough of his knowledge nuggets on Newsvine, try the bite sized morsels now available on Twitter.

The Newsvine team would like to recognize the exceptional work of Shawn Gordon, in independently compiling and publishing the first-ever Newsvine book: The Unofficial Vine.

Shawn took it upon himself to create a project whereby the Newsvine community nominated and voted on the top articles ever published to The Vine. The winning articles were then compiled by Mr. Gordon into a book and put up for sale on Blurb. All proceeds from the sale of the book are to be donated to the American Red Cross. Shawn also chronicled the entire project from his Newsvine column, as well as the accompanying Newsvine group.

You may preview The Unofficial Vine here.

For an in-depth wrap up of what went into the project, please visit Scott Butki's interview of Shawn Gordon.

Please join the Newsvine team in recognizing one of the most creative and compelling projects ever carried out on Newsvine by congratulating Shawn Gordon with us.

The integration of msnbc.com discussion on Newsvine is undergoing a significant change today. Up until now, reading an msnbc.com article like this one and clicking on the "Discuss Story on Newsvine" link directed you to the column of the first person who happened to comment, seeding the article in the process. This has never been an ideal solution, but at the same time, it's brought over a lot of great new users into the Newsvine community.

On the downside, however, msnbc.com readers who might have only wanted to leave a simple comment on a story often found themselves responsible for moderating articles with hundreds of comments their first day on the Vine. Additionally, some Newsvine users began co-opting msnbc.com seeds, sometimes for the honorable purpose of providing quality moderation, and other times simply to goose traffic and earnings to their domain.

Quality msnbc.com articles -- once one of the great discussion starters on Newsvine -- were becoming places where it was difficult to get smarter, and hence a change became necessary.

Beginning today, all msnbc.com articles seeded through the "Discuss This on Newsvine" button on msnbc.com will generate a different type of seed: one that lives in special MSNBC editorial groups we've set up for all MSNBC sections. So, for instance, msnbc.com business stories seeded in this way will live in the Msnbc.com Business Group and not on the rest of Newsvine. We believe that by doing this, we will:

• make it easier for users who discover Newsvine through msnbc.com to more gracefully enter the community
• encourage all users to have more productive discussions
• encourage some of the people who spent time seed harvesting to write their own articles and seed links to different sources.
• continue to re-level the playing field with regard to what sources drive the most traffic
• increase the value of great original writing and thoughtful seeding around the 'Vine

Even after this change, you we still be able to seed msnbc.com articles, but they will live on Newsvine just as any other seed, and will not be related in any way to the seeds originating from the "Discuss This on Newsvine" button.

We also urge you to use the report tools willingly but responsibly. As always, we'll do our best to ensure CoH-compliant conversation, but we can't do it without you.

Beginning today, we are rolling out a completely rewritten comment system. Some users may notice the changes immediately, and others may notice the new stuff several days later. In other words, this is a rolling release, and since it may contain some bugs, we'd rather only a subsection of the Newsvine population be exposed to it at this time.

So, what's new??? A lot of stuff. Some visible and some under the covers:

A WYSIWYG comment editor

At long last, you can now style your comments on Newsvine without typing out longhand XHTML tags. Using the new row of buttons on top of the comment box, you can do things like bold and italicize your text as well as adding links. If you aren't into clicking buttons, you can also use familiar shortcuts like Command-B (or Control-B on Windows) to accomplish the same. We give our thanks to the good folks developing the open-source TinyMCE editor for this bit of welcome awesomeness. Since WYSIWYG text editors on the web don't always produce perfect results, you can always switch to XHTML mode and enter tags in the old fashion way if you like. Swapping back and forth between modes is easy.

Resizable comment box with full screen mode

One of the nice things about the new comment editor is that you can stretch it to be as tall or short as you'd like and your preferred size will be remembered. So if you're a bit longwinded, you can have a big comment box on every page, and if you're more succinct, you can choose a smaller size. Sometimes, however, you're SO passionately engrossed in the penning of a genius comment that you really can't be bothered by any other text on the screen while you're spewing your wisdom. In cases like these, you can now hit the "Full Screen" button and your whole browser will become a canvas for your prose.

Real pagination

As the comment counts have grown at Newsvine, we have been working on a pagination solution which seeks to be an unobtrusive as possible while still allowing for reasonable page load times. We hate pagination over here and we hate sending people to different URLs to read an entire conversation. It's kind of like how you can't just watch an entire season of Dexter by picking up a DVD at your local video store. You have to go to the store multiple times, rent multiple discs, and watch the season piecemeal. It's good for the store and the movie studio as they make more money off of you, but it's bad for you. Pagination is no different, really. Sure we get a few more page views, but the tradeoff is that conversations can become fractured.

Paginating on Newsvine is particularly difficult because we have threaded comments, the super-useful "new" buttons, and the conversation tracker. While those elements make proper pagination extremely difficult, they are also what make Newsvine discussion threads -- from a technical standpoint -- more useful than most other sites' discussion threads.

With this release, we're rolling out "phase 2" of proper pagination on Newsvine (phase 1 was the temporary solution that's been in place for the last couple of months). There will be one more phase to the release, but this one fixes a lot of stuff and makes things generally much better.

Firstly, the conversation tracker now works across multiple pages. Secondly, the "new" buttons and stars now work properly across pages. In other words, if the next "new" comment on a thread happens to be on page 4 and you're on page 1, click on the "new" button will teleport you to page 4. Thirdly, we've turned the final "new" button red so you know you're at the last new comment. Click that final "new" button and you'll be taken to the top of the page. And finally, we now have numbered navigation at the bottoms of our comment threads so you can jump from page 1 to page 30 or directly to the last page with a single click. We're actually encouraged by the amount of bug reports we've gotten every single day for the last month or so about this. We love that people are interested in seeing not just the first comments but also the most recent ones (and theirs, of course).

A new spellchecker

Although our old spellchecker was apparently so good that OldFogey used it to spellcheck his Word documents, it was less than clean under the hood. Aside from using dated code, a new version of it had to be loaded for each domain. In other words, if you read articles from two Newsviners, you loaded the spellcheck twice. We've now switched to TinyMCE's built-in spellchecker so you only have to load the (much smaller) code once. The spellchecker's quite sharp looking as well. We like it even better than the last one.

A complete rewrite of the entire comment rendering process

The code which displays comments on Newsvine is fairly intricate and hasn't been rewritten in a long time. Over the last several months, there have been a lot of enhancements we've wanted to make to comment threads (such as the ones listed above) that we've held off on until the whole thing could be rewritten. It is now rewritten! With all of this heavy lifting out of the way, we look forward to adding things like avatars, country flags, and other elements to Newsvine comment threads that will further set them apart from the rest of the industry's. You may also find that story pages load a lot faster with the new comment service running.

Look for more improvements soon!

In an effort to get the conversation tracker working with pagination, we recently released some changes that enable the "new" links to traverse from one page to the next.

The Newsvine Team is happy to introduce Tyler Adams as Newsvine's newest team member and Community Moderator. An experienced writer and editor, he will be responsible for the day-to-day preservation and advancement of Newsvine's discussions, as well as working with our existing documents to make Newsvine easier to understand for new users and veteran Viners alike.

In short, Tyler is here to help us get smarter about getting smarter. Calvin will be working closely with him during his tenure, but we expect him to establish himself in the community quickly, with your help. Please continue to give us feedback – it's the best way for us to improve our community.

As was the case with our previous Community Moderator, all concerns and correspondences regarding user behavior and abuse will go directly through Tyler from this point forward. He's also a big talker/typist, so we'll let him introduce himself.

On behalf of the Newsvine Team, msnbc.com, MSNBC Television and NBC News, I would like to show our appreciation to Miss Dev, for her amazing work in making Newsvine DNC 2008 coverage a complete success.

Without Dev's selfless hard work, creativity, inspiration, attention to detail, persistence and willingness to roll with the punches, our coverage of the DNC would not have been possible. Of the many things Miss Dev did, here are just a few that stood out as well above and beyond the call of duty:

• Finding Newsvine DNC HQ - a charming house with wifi (that also came with a car!), and stocking it with Colorado-brewed beer and vodka.
• Properly preparing us for our visit to Denver.
• Always being our eyes and ears on the ground.
• Churning out amazing articles day after day, while covering the convention, protests and security in Denver while also juggling 9-5 work!
• Spending 3.5 hours out in the 95+ degree Denver heat to get our press credentials.
• Handling all forms of logistics about where to meet, eat, drink, sleep and write.
• Being a good sport about being separated from the rest of us at Mile High.
• Inspiring her own Mom to also participate in Newsvine DNC coverage!

In addition to bringing Viki, Killfile and me to the DNC, Dev also successfully brought the DNC to thousands of people across the world, in the way that only she can do. She did this by consistently writing fantastic, honest articles that explored complex issues and problems facing ordinary Denverites, as well as America at large. The topics she covered were largely left unexplored by the media, which is why msnbc.com decided to feature the following stories written by Miss Dev directly on the Cover as well the Politics Section.

The Democratic Hypocrisy, or A Person's A Person

I Was There

The "Greenest" Convention

(In)security in Denver

Visiting Denver : A Local's Guide to Her Home City

All that she has done for us, and for Newsvine, goes far beyond being an amazing Newsviner and Citizen Journalist. She is, quite simply, an amazing person. Dev's work at the DNC has paved the road in many important ways for other Newsviners to cover future events that continue to shape our world.

Please join us in recognizing Miss Dev's amazing work, tireless commitment and her unparalleled all-around contribution to Newsvine's mission and purpose, by celebrating her Random Act of Vineness award.

- Calvin

On August 15th I announced the resurrection of an old favorite, the Last Viner Standing contest. It generated some discussion, we came up with some ground rules and Calvin chimed in and offered some prizes from Newsvine.

Random Acts of Vineness are usually handed out for solitary moments of greatness on the 'Vine, but every so often, a member of the community will make just as big an impact with a million smaller moments.

Tedd Riggs has been a Newsvine user for just shy of a year, and in that time, he's dedicated a huge portion of his vine time to fighting CoH violations and welcoming bright new users into the fold. Yes we are fortunate to have many users who dedicate themselves to similar samaritanism, but none with the sheer fortitude of the omnipresent Mr. Riggs. As of this writing, Tedd has posted over 23,000 comments on Newsvine – or over 65 a day – and many of them have been posted with the sole purpose of lending a helping hand around here.

The Newsvine community and the entire Newsvine Staff wish you the best of luck in your recovery from recent surgery, Tedd, and we collectively present you with this Random Act of Vineness for all you do in the good name of community.

I am very happy to announce that after several months of planning and collaboration between Newsvine users and staff, msnbc.com, NBC News and convention organizers - Newsvine will be sending several of our best contributors to both the Democratic National Convention and the Repub …

Over the last several months, the Newsvine Staff has been working with the folks at msnbc.com on a new form of "message board". We're calling them "Question Boards" and they are designed to achieve the following things:

1. Create a place -- completely separate from Newsvine seeds and articles -- where msnbc.com writers, editors, and staff can pose questions for readers to answer (e.g. "How do you feel about the economy?" or "What is your stance on Roe v. Wade?". This is part of our answer to the concern that large amounts of inbound referral traffic from msnbc.com is not going to an ideal place.
2. Replace the aging and feature-deficient MSN message boards on msnbc.com with a newer, more interesting incarnation.
3. Add a compelling level of interactivity to msnbc.com's brand new Political Dashboard which, as of today, will serve as msnbc.com's Politics section front.
4. Test this format to see if should also make its way onto Newsvine as a separate content type (i.e. Articles, Seeds, Questions).

Launching a feature like this in a section as emotionally charged as politics will be challenging, but we're up for it. If everything goes really well, you may see Question Boards all over many different sites, and if things go less-than-perfectly, we'll of course make any necessary improvements.

The idea behind Question Boards is simple: people -- in this case editors, writers, and staff -- have questions to ask and each question may require a different sort of answer. Some may require multiple choice, some are "position polls" (agree, disagree), some should be answered with 160 characters or less, and some are freeform Newsvine-style threaded discussions. When a question is created, any mix of those options can be chosen.

The display of the results is where Question Boards get really interesting though. We not only show you percentage breakdowns of how people are answering but there are also geographical hooks in place to indicate which areas of the country (and world eventually) are answering in what ways.

This project has involved a lot of staff time over the past several months (see: Lance, in the office until 4am on many occasions) and we realize there are a million other things to release and tend to on Newsvine but we hope you'll give us your feedback on Question Boards and the msnbc.com Political Dashboard so we know if it should be something that makes its way to Newsvine.

Tonight at 10PM PDT, Newsvine will be offline for about 20 minutes, followed by a few hours of "read-only" activity while we move our site to a new facility.

DNS should slowly propagate over the next few hours, and should be fully resolved by around 3AM. The old site will redirect to the new site for a week or so until everyone has the new DNS entries. You might notice some slight flakiness with the conversation tracker and/or watchlists for the first few hours of site activity.

The new facility provides us room to grow and integration with a top notch 24x7 monitoring team. It's also going to free up some of the Newsvine Team to focus more on the product and less on site monitoring and operations.

We thank everyone for their patience.

The Newsvine Team would like to recognize the work of JFXGILLIS in his recent article, Correctly Political: Liquid Lunch with Donald Rumsfeld. In this article, Jack Gillis presents a number of declassified audio clips, made available to the public under the Freedom of Information Act, and offers a smart analysis of the Pentagon's questionable relationship with a number of retired military officers who served as "independent" military analysts in the mainstream media.

Jack's article was picked up widely across the web, by sites such as The Huffington Post and Daily Kos. In perhaps the most interesting turn of events, one of the actual attendees of a luncheon detailed in Gillis' article, Command Sergeant Major Steven Greer (USA, Ret), showed up in Jack's thread to clear up several facts, as well as to offer his own viewpoint of the controversy - and Jack later amended his article accordingly, in the interest of accuracy.

Jack's work is emblematic of what we like to see Newsviners doing (i.e., using the resources at their disposal to offer perspectives on events in the media that remain otherwise unexplored and/or underrepresented). While Command Sergeant Major Steven Greer's appearance at Newsvine couldn't have been predicted, we are thrilled to see the Newsvine platform reach its fullest potential by not only being a place where the news is thoroughly discussed, but also serving as a venue for news to continue to unfold.

We salute Mr. Gillis' efforts and recognize the tremendous creativity, initiative and attention to detail he displayed in publishing the piece described above. We would also like to take this opportunity to recognize Jack Gillis' instrumental role in the migration and settlement of the NYTimes Refugees - a group of folks who once arrived as strangers to this community but now call Newsvine home and are an integral part of it.

Thank you, Jack Gillis, and congratulations.

If you tried to use Newsvine late Tuesday afternoon, you may have noticed that you couldn't. We experienced a power outage at our data center and it took longer than expected to recover from.

Although the cause of this power outage was human (non-Newsvine employee) error, we regret the downtime and apologize for the disruption in service. Newsvine takes uptime very seriously, and this marks only the third period of extended downtime in our company's 2.5 year history.

On the bright side, we're getting ready to move the entire site into msnbc.com's vastly superior data center, with faster machines, 24/7 monitoring, and better connectivity.

Building communities is a tricky task, especially online. All hosts can really do is provide an environment with an ideal set of benefits, and ideal set of guidelines, and hope the right sorts of people show up. Whether the community flourishes or fizzles from there is a product of hard work from community members, hard work from staff, and just plain luck.

That 99 out of 100 online communities devolve into anarchies or ghost towns is usually a result of those communities' guidelines not keeping up with usage or people just plain losing interest. Thankfully, we've been able to avoid this fate at Newsvine by concentrating on what makes this site different: engaging conversation. Yes, many will argue that especially in the middle of politics season, people aren't always as nice as they should be, but if you compare the average comment thread at Newsvine to the average thread at Digg, Topix, The Huffington Post, or almost any other participatory news site, you'll generally find the discourse here measures up very well. People talking to people is what we care about. Not people typing into text boxes.

Being part of the msnbc.com family has already yielded many benefits in the several months since we started working together. We've gotten two of our members on national TV. We've had great Q&A sessions with the likes of Chuck Todd, Richard Engel, and others. We're mentioned on the NBC Nightly News from time to time. And msnbc.com, with its 35 million or so monthly unique users, continues to send a lot of new people to some of the best articles Newsviners write, as a result of efforts such as the Gateway groups, ConsumerVine and Gut Check America - just to name a few.

Part of Newsvine staff's charge, however, is to get msnbc.com's users more involved in their news site of choice; whether it be msnbc.com or Newsvine. This is a bit of a tricky proposition, because msnbc.com already has a ton of users, but they just have no means by which to talk to each other. Newsvine is a natural arena in which to encourage this sort of community building, but at the same time, one could argue that funneling people en masse into Newsvine would mess with the community dynamic. For this reason, we've been building systems that will accommodate community activity on msnbc.com and on Newsvine, such that we can see which implementation works best for Newsvine users, msnbc.com users, and staff.

Some things will work well (see NBC reporter Q&As hosted on Newsvine) and some things won't (see out-of-context questions posted as articles). The only way we can maximize what works well and minimize what doesn't is for you to give us feedback. If you have an idea for a feature or if you don't like the way something we launch is turning out, please write to us. Anytime you use the Contact Newsvine form, the entire staff sees your email so it's generally more effective than writing a public article that we may or may not see.

The newest thing we've launched -- just last week -- is a new "Discuss This on Newsvine" button which now appears on all msnbc.com stories. To be honest, we didn't expect more than a few clicks a day on these buttons as generally "Seed Newsvine", "Digg This", and every other social networking button you see on the web have very low clickthrough rates, but so far we're getting a lot more than that. The result has been a few msnbc.com stories a day receiving hundreds of comments apiece. This is a good thing, of course, because it proves out the theory that plenty of msnbc.com users are interesting in discussing stories, but it's potentially a bad thing because as we all know, when new users come en masse to a Newsvine thread, they aren't always aware of how we do things around here. We were all new at one time. Please welcome in our new visitors as you would a new guest to your own cocktail party, with diplomacy and patience. We hope that the Newsvine community puts its best foot forward when receiving new participants into the collective discussion.

There are several things we're going to do already to help ease potential problems with these sorts of things. The first will be to add a "Greenhouse" designation to the tops of new users' comments. In doing this, we hope to make it more clear, on first glance, who is a new user and who has been around awhile. The second is to remove the ability for NBC/MSNBC/Newsvine staff to appear on the leaderboard.

Thanks to everyone for their continued patience and stewardship as we fix bugs and build out more features, and once again, never hesitate to write us with suggestions or concerns.

The corporate world can no longer ignore a surprising and powerful new trend emerging among US consumers. A radical shift in spending behavior is taking shape and you and I are at the core of it.

This week on NBC Nightly News, we're presenting a series on alternative and complementary medicine called "The Mind-Body Connection," in which we take a look at growing trends such as medical clinics that look like high-end spas, the practice of Tai Chi and a new emphasis on "min …

The increasingly jittery U.S. economy has had an impact on every facet of American life, from rising food prices to the outcomes of presidential primaries.

A decade after it first approved devices for laser eye-correcting surgery, the Food and Drug Administration is taking a closer look at grievances from Lasik surgery patients, including blurred vision and dry eyes.