CNN.com

CNN RSVPed with its online plans for coverage of the United Kingdom’s royal wedding between Prince William and Catherine Middleton, set for Friday, April 29.

CNN.com has already launched The Wedding Planner, a special section that includes background, profiles, photo galleries, video-on-demand, and other exclusive content.

Also up and running is blog Unveiled, which covers all of the behind-the-scenes details leading up to the big event.

iReport, the cable news network’s citizen journalism outlet, is holding a Royal Wedding iReporter Contest, with one U.S.-based winner traveling to London to cover the wedding. Contestants are asked to submit 90-second videos explaining why they should cross the pond.

Beginning April 22, iReport is also inviting citizen journalists to share their experiences, as well as launching CNN iReport Open Story: Royal Wedding, which will feature photos and videos placed along an interactive time line and map.

And CNN set up a CNN Royal Wedding page on Facebook.

Join Baratunde Thurston (left), The Onion’s Director of Digital and author of How to Be Black, for an entertaining look at creative social media campaigns in our Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting February 16. Other speakers include Morin Oluwole (Facebook), Tim Devane (bitly), and SocialTimes' writer Devon Glenn.   Register now.

Nuclear power has been in the news quite a bit this past week, and not in a good way, with the issues at Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power plant. For those in the United States who are concerned about potential similar situations, CNNMoney launched an interactive map that allows users to determine if they are located in 10-mile or 50-mile danger zones near nuclear plants.

The map also displays the five closest nuclear plants to users’ homes, and reminds them that air could be unsafe within 10 miles in the event of a crisis, and food and water might be affected within 50 miles.

The winners of the inaugural edition of the CNN iReport Awards were announced Tuesday at the CNN Grill at the 2011 South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas, by CNN.com participation director Lila King. They were:

Breaking News Coverage: Michael Roberts, early images of Deepwater Horizon fire;

Original Reporting: Percy von Lipinski, bison as pet;

Compelling Imagery (Photos or Video): Mugur Vărzariu, Abandon Valley;

Commentary: James Amerson, Dear Gulf, I’ll miss you;

Personal Story: Faithe Chu, My escape from Vietnam;

Interview: Tristan Macaraeg, 16-year-old interviews classmate on living in foster care;

Community Choice: Samantha Bolton; and

iReport Spirit Awards: Janie Lambert, Julio Ortiz-Teissonniere, Omékongo Dibinga, Shari Atukorala, and Sherbien Dacalanio.

CNN.com has a new homepage editor: Tenny Tatusian, previously associate editor for LATimes.com.

Tatusian will oversee the overall messaging and tone of the cable network’s home page.

Location-based mobile app Gowalla added a CNN iReport option to its Highlights, allowing citizen journalists contributing to the cable network’s initiative to use Gowalla Passport Holders to highlight important locations.

When the Gowalla Passport Holders are added, messages will automatically be uploaded to CNN iReport, and highlights can be shared on other platforms including Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.

CNN producers will be able to choose reports highlighted via Gowalla for use in the network’s reporting, and users whose content is chosen will receive CNN iReport pins on their Gowalla passports.

CNN.com participation director Lila King said:

Opening up iReport to the Gowalla community is an exciting step for participatory journalism. By bringing the power of location services to our iReport community, we are connecting our audience to the precise places where news events are happening.

CNN.com and TIME.com teamed up to launch Global Public Square, a new blog that will feature insights on global news from CNN Fareed Zakaria GPS host and TIME editor at large Fareed Zakaria, as well as journalists from the cable network and the magazine, and other expert guests.

Global Public Square is edited by CNN.com World producer Amar Bakshi, and guests set to contribute over the next few weeks include: foursquare co-founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai; statistics guru Hans Rosling; and Nina Hachigian, co-author of The Next American Century.

CNN’s Nic Robertson will also provide analysis on Libya’s tipping point, and CNN Cairo bureau chief Ben Wedeman will report on the ongoing unrest in the Middle East and north Africa. Global Public Square will also feature a weekly news quiz, and a books of the week entry.

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CNN.com launched the Freedom Project blog as the online base for CNN’s The CNN Freedom Project: Ending Modern-Day Slavery, a project that will run throughout 2011 on the cable network and Web site, aimed at detailing modern-day slavery, stopping the trading and exploitation of humans, and hearing from the victims.

Regular features on the blog will include: The Number, a weekly graphic examining the numbers related to human trafficking; Solutions, success stories about people and nations fighting the problem; iReport Challenge, giving members of user-generated news community CNN iReport assignments to allow them to participate in the discussion; and data visualizations demonstrating the scope of the problem, local and global aspects, and the lack of consistent numbers.

All content from the Freedom Project blog will also be available via CNN Mobile, and the project has a Twitter account and a Facebook page.

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The revolutions in Egypt and Libya helped push CNN.com to a 10 percent traffic gain in February compared with the year-earlier month.

During the first three days of the month, Egypt helped drive the cable news network’s site to a daily average 17 percent higher than that of the prior four weeks. It was Libya’s turn Monday, Feb. 21, when traffic was 55 percent higher than the prior-four-Sunday average and 6 percent higher than the last Monday holiday (Jan. 17).

Total video starts (live and video-on-demand) were up 30 percent compared with the fourth quarter of 2010, and live video starts were up 20 percent.

Feature content also performed well for CNN.com in February, with Tech averaging 1 million daily page views, up 18 percent; versus February 2010 Opinion at 500,000, up 51 percent; Health at 860,000, up 46 percent; and Living at 800,000, up 66 percent. And CNN.com said blog traffic accounted for 97 million page views in February.

CNN announced the launch of its CNN App for the Android Honeycomb tablet platform, available free-of-charge via the Android Market.

As the cable news network detailed earlier this month, the app includes iReport capture and upload functionality, live and on-demand video, and CNN Radio updates. The main screen can be viewed in Broadsheet mode, which presents up to 350 stories, along with images and headlines, as well as direct access to the other components mentioned above.

Users can comment alongside content on the screen and share text stories and images via email, Facebook, and Twitter, and they can also flip through story headlines and images directly on their home screens by accessing the app’s layered image widget.

The app marks the first time user-generated news community iReport is available on a tablet, and its live video takes advantage of HTTP live streaming capabilities.

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CNN‘s South Africa 2010: Twitter Buzz received an award in the category of Innovative News at the United Kingdom’s Royal Television Society Awards.

South Africa 2010: Twitter Buzz enabled fans following FIFA World Cup 2010 South Africa to monitor and visualize Twitter activity, providing an interactive visualization of how many Tweets per minute each topic generated, as well as photos representing soccer topics generating the most buzz, which changed sizes as the number of related Tweets fluctuated. Categories included players, teams, and topics, and fans were able to browse back through an archive of Tweets from the past 24 hours.

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