I have seen the future, or more precisely, little pieces of the future protruding into the present. Barnes &Nobel has unwrapped its e-reader, dubbed "Nook," which is intentionally crippled by its corporate masters. But it won't stay that way.

Here's how it's crippled: There's no Web browser. I get it. The Nook connects to download books and periodicals from B&N's online store through AT&T's 3G digital wireless phone network. The cost of that service is included in the purchase price (and in B&N's bookselling business model).

AT&T is already hurting from high 3G usage by iPhone users. And B&N wants you to buy pay books, not read BoingBoing.

At any rate, no Web browser means no Web browsing. It also means you can't use the built-in Wifi alternative from your hotel or airport lounge, because you need a Web browser to authenticate.

Crippled. But this will not last. I expect to see a Wifi-only Web browser on this device before long, and if B&N doesn't do it, somebody will jailbreak it.

The Nook is based on free, open software: Linux with Google's Android user interface. Regardless of what AT&T and B&N might wish, within five years you're going to see Chinese factories flooding the marketplace with open, Web-friendly, Android-powered devices that look pretty much like this and connect through any Wi-Fi hub. There's already an iRex device headed for your local Best Buy.

Technology wants to be used. E.Ink, which owns the high-resolution/low-power display technology, stands to make a whole lot more money from hundreds of millions of open e-readers than from tens of thousands of closed e-readers. Factories want to build and ship products. People want to do things, not just read.

At this point, devices like the Nook and the Kindle are slow and therefore best used as readers of fairly static content. A PDF-like periodical is more at home on these devices than a Web page with 187 embedded images, Flash movies, CSS and Javascript files. This will change, too; the ARM chip will continue to improve and the displays will get faster and connectivity will be ubiquitous.

So the Nook shows us a glimpse of the future, but it is not the future. We will see cheap, fast, reliable, easy-to-use and most especially open tablets hanging from blister packs at Target stores. That's the future, and it's only a matter of time.

I've been running successful online communities since the mid-1980s when I first got a modem, discovered bulletin boards, and wound up running one. Over the years I've discovered a few things about how to do it right. Here are seven keys to the kingdom:

1. Make it a priority.

   Quit whining that it's so much trouble to deal with commenting and community interaction. That's why they call it work. Be glad you have a chance to do it.

   Community interaction should not be a marginal part of your online effort. Social interaction is a powerful basic human need.

   The Internet is a social medium. Social-networking and forum sites get seven times the traffic of newspaper sites in the United States -- and more than any other type of site, including all search engines.

   This is your opportunity to play a role at the center instead of the fringes of the online experience.

2. Have a clear community mission.

   Why are you doing any of this? Why is any of this of any value at all to the community? Can you explain it in just a few sentences?

   If your goal is just cheap pageviews that you can convert into revenue, then you pretty much deserve all the abuse you're going to collect.

   Your mission shouldn't be about your site. Your site should be about your mission, and your mission should be about your community. What value are you trying to create?

3. Share that vision and ask for help.

   In 2005 we launched BlufftonToday.com in a town that was growing so rapidly that it was in danger of losing its center, its identity.

   We did it with this language:

   This is a new kind of community website that joins with the Bluffton Today newspaper in a mission of helping Bluffton come together as a community.

   With your help, we will provide a friendly, safe, easy to use place on the Web for everyone in Bluffton to post news items, create a unified community calendar, and share photos, recipes, opinions.

   This is a place where you take the lead in telling your own story. ....

   In return, we ask that you meet this character challenge: be a good citizen and exhibit community leadership qualities. It's a simple and golden rule. Act as you would like your neighbors to act.

4. Follow up with tight moderation.

   You've made a promise: a friendly, safe place. Keep it. This means a zero-tolerance policy toward personal abuse and intimidation. Stop bullies before they start.

   You may have heard that you shouldn't moderate user postings. That's absolutely not correct. In the United States at least, you may be legally wise not to edit or even prescreen user-posted content, but you should always remove content that is abusive, obscene, spam, scam or otherwise detrimental to the community goals you have set forth.

   It's important to be consistent and thorough about this.

5. Require registration with real information.

   Don't allow anonymous commenting. Pseudonyms are another matter. Protecting commenters' personal privacy may be a good thing, but you should know who your users are.

   Registration -- especially when coupled with a persistent personal profile -- is a powerful tool for moderating behavior.

6. Participate.

   The single biggest mistake you can make is to fail to show up at the party where you're supposed to be the host.

   Your presence is important and valued by your users.

   This isn't just a place for your "community interaction expert" or "social media editor."

   This is a place for reporters and senior editors, too.

   You will bring much to the party, but you'll also get much from the party.

   Participation gives you a new window into the soul of your community -- what people think, what they value, what they know. You'll come away with ideas, leads, new directions.

   And recognize this: As a journalist, your mission is not just to report the news. It's to help people discover and understand the truth. When you see misinformation in blogs or comments, don't ignore it. In a calm and nonconfrontational way, you should correct errors and misapprehensions. Point to authoritative material.

   We no longer live in a world where it's good enough to gather, order and present information.

   The story arc has been extended through community conversation, and journalists have an important role to play in the tail of the process.

7. Give power to your users.

   Recognize, in both words and action, that your site belongs to its user community as much as it belongs to you.

   If you only "allow" commenting on news stories, you're not quite getting it.

   Provide ways for your users to set the agenda. This might take any number of forms, but obvious ones are community-driven blogs and forums.

   And provide tools for you users to help maintain the quality of the site. Your users will gladly help monitor your site for abuse if you provide tools to flag bad behavior.

If you do these things consistently, you'll be well down the road to maintaining that shared sense of purpose that is the ultimate key to a healthy online community.

Howard Owens' declaration that the original sin of newspapers was "Keeping online units tethered to the mother ship" is the subject of much chatter this morning. Having been on more than one side of that question, and having been one of the originals, I categorically reject the notion of any "original sin."

Unless, of course, you think inaction is a sin. Those who were in the vast center of gravity in newspaper journalism simply came to work and did their print-focused jobs every day. They were not change agents. They were not inventors. They believed -- rightly -- that their role as journalists constituted a valuable public service and that they should focus on it. While those may turn out to be the good intentions that pave the road to hell, I won't call it "sin."

But back to Howard's assertion, which I find flawed (in its assumption that newspapers haven't tried) but interesting.

The question of how to organize new-media efforts in an old-media company is an old one. I think the first panel discussion on which I appeared back in the mid-1990s focused on that question.

The truth is that newspaper companies have tried more twists and variations than most people recognize. Like the paid-content question that Alan Mutter claims to be an original sin, newspapers have a track record of empirical learnings that perhaps ought to be considered before jumping off into a debate about beliefs.

At the end of the last century I was executive editor of Cox Interactive Media, which ran local websites in a dozen or so U.S. cities and had an ambition of opening operations in the top 50 markets.

Some of the sites were affiliated with Cox newspapers, and with typical newspaper myopia, most people in the newspaper industry think that's what CIM was all about.

But most of the sites actually were in Cox broadband cable markets and Cox television markets. They didn't have the addictive benefit of a daily dump of newspaper copy. They had to create their own content. This included news and sports coverage, but also Web directories, forums, ranking/rating systems, local contests, games and some large-scale efforts to host websites for community organizations.

My time at CIM disabused me of some of the arrogance that newspaper people unfortunately carry into any conversation about the Internet. Research showed that some of the CIM sites matched or exceeded the local market reach of the newspaper-based competition in markets like Providence and San Diego.

And some of the ideas have stood the test of time. At CIM, we evolved a program of going to a community event, shooting hundreds of digital photos, handing out business cards with the website's URL, and posting the results in photo galleries designed to crank pageviews and induce viral link-sharing. The content/marketing program that Morris now runs, called Spotted, was essentially based on that experience.

CIM, which was intended to become a spinoff company, was dismantled in the economic collapse that came at the end of the original dotcom bubble. In the political infighting that followed, Cox threw away much of what it had learned.

The interesting thing about Howard's post is his identification of a principle: "Instead of thinking about how to generate more cash, I needed to figure out how to create a news operation that could exist profitably based on a reasonable expectation for local online revenue." This essentially is what we were trying to do with the thinly staffed CIM studios, although I'd substitute "local media business" for the more narrow "news operation."

This principle is stated by Clayton Christensen as "patient for scale, impatient for profits." And the Harvard crew has many tales of disruptive efforts more effectively being positioned at a distance from the mothership (think about IBM's PC division, which built computers at a Water-Pik factory.)

Several years ago I found myself sucked into one of those painfully chronic debates about paid content. OK, it wasn't exactly a debate, it was a discussion about how we (the online guys) could stop a paid-content movement championed by a publisher and a couple of print circulation people.

Suddenly I had had enough. It all felt paranoid. And I was frustrated by the implicit assumption that we couldn't do anything to build audience online other than pump newspaper shovelware onto the Web. I stood up and announced: "OK, I officially change my vote.

"Put the newspaper content behind a wall," I said. "It'll fail, but that's not important.

"What's important is the question: What should we be doing to build an audience without the benefit of the newspaper content?"

This led to a reconsideration that eventually yielded the blog-centered community conversation model of BlufftonToday.com, where the original plan was to not put any of the newspaper content online.

A radical move, such as setting up your online operations as a separate division, or (in Howard's case) quitting the newspaper business to set out on your own, is an effective way to force a confrontation with that basic question: What should we be doing?

It is a confrontation that does not require a spinoff or a startup. Anyone can confront that question. So, why don't we? Is it sloth? Isn't that one of those ... sins?

In 1965, before a lot of you were born, Eric Burdon of the Animals sang these lines:

But I'm just a soul whose intentions are good:
Oh Lord! Please don't let me be misunderstood ...

That's the background music. Here's the story.

Some geeks at the AP got together with some geeks in Europe and came up with a really smart idea. Unfortunately, that smart idea got sucked into the swirling vortex of panic and craziness that reigns at a lot of media companies these days. And a really smart idea has become terribly misunderstood, twisted into a really bad idea, portrayed as something it is not, sold as a cure for a questionable ailment that it can't fix.

The idea is the application of microformats to news content. A microformat, for those of you who aren't all geeked out, is a way of adding hints to HTML markup so that Web spiders and other software can precisely discover facts without having to guess. This is a name. That is an address. And so forth.

A microformat lets you indicate structure where otherwise there would be just a big messy blob of data. It's sort of an "Oh Lord! Please don't let me be misunderstood" message to web spiders and scrapers.

If you understand how important search engines are to the Internet, this probably makes sense to you. You see why structure is important. Looking for a restaurant? You care that it's a restaurant and not a drycleaner with a similar name. And you care where it is. Making certain that a Web spider understands a location reference is the job of the geo microformat, which is used in standards called hCard (sort of like business cards) and hCalendar (events happen in a location).

Collectively, all of these little hints are small parts of a broader movement toward a World Wide Web of data and meaning, referred to as the Semantic Web. But you don't need to go down that rabbit hole to understand this. If you're a journalist, you understand that a byline is significant: it clearly identifies the writer responsible for a story. A dateline is significant: it identifies the location central to the story, where the writer presumably gathered the information. Wouldn't it be great if we had a standard, machine-readable way to indicate byline and dateline in Web content? Instead of just throwing it out there and hoping for the best?

We get that from hNews, a proposal from two UK-based organizations, the Media Standards Trust and the Web Science Research Initiative, with the help of some money from the MacArthur Foundation and the Knight Foundation. The proposal has been picked up by some smart geeks inside the Associated Press. But then everything went wrong.

What the AP announced was not a smart initiative to properly encode structure into its blobbish data, but rather a harebrained scheme to "create a news registry that will tag and track all AP content online to assure compliance with terms of use." It's harebrained because it does nothing of the sort. Even worse, it's a crass harebrained scheme, an attempt to suck up to AP's base of newspaper publishers not unlike a Republican politician sucking up to the birther crazies.

(What's the connection? This: Nobody in their right mind thinks Barack Obama isn't an American citizen. Nobody in their right mind thinks newspapers are facing financial trouble because of evil content pirates on the Internet. But there's no shortage of people willing to believe any convenient nonsense that excuses them of personal responsibility for the situation in which they find themselves. Crass.)

So let's get back to hNews. It lets a news organization publish news on the Web that looks to the consumer pretty much like it always did, but behind the scenes, it's easy for fact-stripping robots to identify and extract fielded data.

One of those fields may include licensing terms. A standard for machine-readable copying conditions is a good thing.

But if you think for a minute that such a standard prevents pirates from copying and distributing your content, you're either smoking something, or you're a technologically ignorant. Filtering out microformats is child's play. If you're a pirate, you will have no qualms in doing so.

So we have on the floor a proposal. From the perspective of building a better Internet, it's a good idea. From the perspective of stopping bad people from stealing, it's utterly ineffective. We should understand what it really does, and adopt it for what it really is, and drop the silly posturing about how it's going to make all our financial troubles vanish. Because it's not that, not at all. What it is, is a good thing.