Thanks to Brad Tousenard for letting us know about a new site he’s developed for the University of British Columbia, A Place of Mind:

“A Place of Mind is a web site created for the University of British Columbia to aggregate their content from a variety of online sources like YouTube, Flickr, Twitter, and blogs. The site is configured to pull feeds from these sources and import specially tagged posts”

The design and creative work was produced by Fjord Interactive and development work done by Brad Touesnard.

[ Visit A Place of Mind ]

Great piece in the The Nieman Journalism Lab about how the Ann Arbor Chronicle is able to produce a top notch on-line only publication using WordPress as it’s publishing platform:

And this is what it feels like: 15 hours a day, seven days a week, from the 7 a.m. check-in with your spouse-turned-business-partner to the midnight bookkeeping.

No kids, no vacations, no car. No office; your only away-from-home base is a former Main Street antique shop that sells shared-workspace memberships to freelance software developers and the like for $100 a month. No novels before bed; there’s no time. If it’s a Saturday and the Michigan team is playing, you can watch the game, but run back to your keyboard during the commercials, okay?

As part of the morning routine, they check their WordPress dashboard for vital stats:

3. Inbound links checked daily. The day before I visited, logs for the Chronicle’s WordPress site reported that it had drawn 277 visitors from a local sports blog, 28 from a local school blog and 23 from annarbor.com, the reincarnated Ann Arbor News.

[ Visit Ann Arbor Chronicle ]

Thanks Dave for letting us know that OnStar, the vehicle safety and security service, has selected WordPress MU and the discussion forum platform bbPress for their new OnStar Connections site:

There is some lively discussions going on in the forums, which also have Gravatar support turned on.

[ Visit OnStar Connections ]

Tasty Kitchen, a site by The Pioneer Woman, Ree Drummond, has launched a community site on the BuddyPress platform:

Built by the team at Voce Communication, Nick Gernert in a blog post today describes BuddyPress this way:

Not to over-simplify things, but think “Facebook in a Box.”
Groups, Wire posts (think Facebook Wall), activity streams, friend lists and forums are all a part of the platform. These all build from the user system native to WordPress and simply add functions to allow users to interact with each other. Use as many or as few of the capabilities as you like.

The site also integrates with the Windows Live, allowing Live users to authenticate instantly — something I believe is a first for a non-Microsoft site.

[ Visit Tasty Kitchen ]

Great to see thefader.com, has relaunched using WordPress. The FADER, or just FADER as we call it in NY, is a magazine that covers music & fashion with lots of hip-hop, dance, rock, and reggae coverage:

The FADER was previously on a custom Ruby on Rails CMS that was built in-house.

[ Visit TheFader.com ]

I’ve been chatting with the folks at Tierra Innovation and WNET.ORG (Channel Thirteen in New York) on their impressive collaboration utilizing WordPress MU as a CMS for WNET.ORG’s network of high-traffic websites:

Using WordPress MU’s built-in features along with custom themes and plugins such as WPDB Profiling, they made it easier and much cheaper for WNET.ORG to roll out multiple sites that provide a great user experience as well as editorial and creative flexibility. Before the new CMS, WNET.ORG could only launch 1-2 sites per month. Now, they have the capability of rolling out 5-10 sites per month for a fraction of the cost.

What’s very cool is that Tierra and WNET put together a white-paper detailing how this project came about and how they ultimately decided on WordPress as the platform of choice. You can read all about it in the white-paper titled: How a Non-Profit Media Company Profits from Building Open Source Online Publishing Platform (PDF) (embedded below using scribd):

[ Visit WNET.ORG & Tierra Innovation ]

Telegraph blogs, a thriving section of the Telegraph.co.uk news site, has relaunched all of their blogs on the WordPress MU platform:

Damian Thompson, Blogs Editor of the Telegraph Media Group, announced the upgrade:

Telegraph blogs look different this morning – really different. Overnight we moved everything to WordPress, the world’s most successful and elegant open-source blogging software. It’s a big change that offers immediate benefits to our readers, with many more to come.

Telegraph Media Group has always been an innovator in the digital space dating back to their early web site efforts in 1994. With their recent award as Digital Publisher of the Year, and now this move to WordPress, they continue to impress !

[ Visit Telegraph blogs ]

Recently GigaOM – a network of sites focused on technology news, analysis and opinions – launched a new premier research membership site powered by BuddyPress running on WordPress MU.

This new site, called GigaOM Pro, was created “to address the gap that exists in real-time expert industry analysis on emerging technology markets.”:

The site was built by Mark Jaquith, who has written up a few thoughts and tech details on this very exciting project.

[ Visit GigaOM Pro ]

The Ford Story is a recently launched site committed to making Ford’s progress towards getting new high-quality, fuel-efficient cars, and trucks on the road today transparent and open. The site is completely powered by WordPress and uses WordPress as a CMS to deliver a wide variety of static content, videos, photos, and dynamic updates.

We talked to Scott Monty from the Global Digital Communications group at The Ford Motor Company to see what the company’s experience using WordPress has been like so far.

Why did you choose WordPress over other publishing platforms?

We wanted to use a flexible platform that would easily integrate with the social web. The Ford Story is going to be a dynamic site, and we wanted to be ready to respond to the needs of the day, so we needed a technology that would allow us to take a modular approach. Knowing that we could use plugins and other components that connect with the rest of the web was a strong selling point.

What was the process of designing and developing The Ford Story site with WordPress like for you and your team?

The team that did the actual development hadn’t used WordPress for Ford before, but from what I understand, they were immediately able to work with WordPress and make it function the way we needed. As we have continued to develop and tweak the site, WordPress has allowed to do so on the fly.

What aspect of WordPress has been the biggest help in getting your site up and running and keeping it going how you want it?

We’re going to be giving the site a bit of an overhaul in a few weeks, and the team has been actively testing code, plugins, and different features of the site. The ability to quickly swap in and out these components has made the process pretty smooth.

Where else is WordPress used at Ford?

We already use it for our Social Media Press Releases and for our Autoshows site.

How does WordPress fit in with Ford’s broader move towards embracing social media?

Our vision for social media is to connect consumers with the people of Ford and to allow them to connect with each other, providing value along the way. We hope that as we turn The Ford Story into the social media hub for the company that this is clearer than ever. We know that WordPress is a widely respected, well-known, and community-developed platform in the social media space. It means that we’re more closely aligned with current trends and Web technologies and that we can develop the site more quickly as we move into the future.

Health.com has launched the Ask the Natural Living Experts forum hosted on the new TalkPress VIP service:

This new discussion area enables Helath.com’s visitors to interact with healthy living experts in a forum and Q&A environment. This forum site also runs our anti-spam service Akismet and integrates seamlessly with the other Health.com WordPress.com VIP blogs. That means visitors to Health.com sites such as Healthy Living, are already registered for the forums and can begin interacting immediately.

For a bit more info on the technical workings of TalkPress head over to Sam’s post on that topic. And for more details on the building of this forum project, the lead consultant Watershed Studio has posted a few thoughts.

[ Visit Ask The Natural Living Expert ]