Team iReport had a special visitor last week: globe-trotting iReporter Neal Moore. He has lived in Taiwan, South Africa, Namibia and Thailand, among other places, but this time he came back to the U.S. for one of the biggest journeys of his life: a 4 1/2-month canoe trip down the Mississippi River from Lake Itasca, Minnesota, to New Orleans, Louisiana, on a mission to iReport the positive stories he found along the way.

Fresh from this extraordinary trip, Moore had a lot to tell us about this uplifting experience.

A Mark Twain fan, he said he will never forget having the rare opportunity to spend the night in Twain’s boyhood home. But one highlight of his trip took him by complete surprise: his visit to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, surrounded on all sides by the mighty Mississippi. In this prison, where many inmates stay for the rest of their days, he says was inspired by those who were making an effort at rehabilitation.

“It was sort of life-changing to go in there and to meet people who are in prison like this who are stepping up and accomplishing something through communication,” he said.

Regardless of where he went, Moore says he left feeling more positive about his home country than ever before. “From the top of the river down, I would find communities who are rallying around a central cause or theme, putting their best foot forward,” he says, “whether it be Mark Twain, literacy or fighting cancer.”

Moore says he’ll never forget this trip, and we will never forget meeting him. You can follow the path he took by map and on video in CNN’s special coverage of his journey, and watch for him on this month’s edition of “iReport for CNN” on CNN International.

Soon after we sent out a breaking news alert at 2:53 Friday afternoon on the House banking bill, Thursday’s alert on President Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize was mistakenly sent again. We apologize for the duplication.

During "Nutcracker" season, we “ballet moms” see a lot more of one another, carefully balancing our two-classes-a-week acquaintanceships with (at least for me) a bit of mental competitiveness. Will my daughter get a better part than hers? Is it a mistake to hold my son out of "Nutcracker" for a year while hers gets his feet wet?

I’ve had a more delicate balancing act this year at The Georgia Ballet: I’m still a ballet mom, but I also documented the seasonal rite of passage for a video on CNN.com. Shooting the auditions gave me a vantage point that many other ballet moms covet. “How’d she do?” they’d ask. The mom in me wanted to give them all the details of the auditions, but the video producer in me would only allow vague niceties.
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We’re always looking for cool ways to connect you with the news and newsmakers. So when experimental journalist and author A.J. Jacobs stopped by the CNN.com newsroom recently, we asked him to get in on the fun - and be a part of a something we've never tried before.

In many ways, A.J. has made his life one big experiment. He once outsourced his life to India, and also spent a year living as literally as possible by the Bible. He spent another year reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z - all 44 million words of it.
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We recently launched a new destination on CNN.com for coverage of one of the most critical stories of this moment in history. It’s called “Afghanistan Crossroads.”

The story of Afghanistan is global, political and personal. It’s rich in terms of breaking news, history and culture. CNN is devoting talented journalists around the world to this story and the results take the form of compelling video, stunning photography and daily observations on life in the region. We have exclusive interviews and smart opinions. The idea was to use this blog to capture all of this great reporting and pair it with smart thoughts from our many users, creating a center-of-gravity on the Web for Afghanistan coverage.
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“You'd think it would be one big sonic boom,” iReporter Adriana Maxwell said of witnessing the space shuttle Atlantis launch from three miles away. “Instead, it almost feels like it travels across the ocean, and you feel the boom right in the middle of your chest.”

How did she get to see a launch from that close? When NASA announced to their Twitter followers that they would be holding the first “Tweetup” at Cape Canaveral, Florida, Maxwell signed up right away to be one of only 100 people invited to attend. And she shared her front-row photos through iReport, and they made their way into CNN.com’s coverage of the launch.
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As I was putting together the story on young phenoms, I realized most teen athletes have a driving force, someone that pushes them to be great.

Andre Agassi, Tiger Woods, Kaká, and Venus and Serena Williams have their fathers. Lebron James and Cristiano Ronaldo have their mothers. Mike Tyson had his trainer and adoptive dad, Constantine "Cus" D'Amato, and Dakota Simms has his parents, Terence and Yoshi.
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For the last four years, live video has been a big part of CNN.com. From launching the first live online video service in 2005 with CNN Pipeline, to breaking the all-time record for the largest live video event in Internet history earlier this year, suffice it to say, CNN.com changed the game for live video online.

Along the way, you taught us a lot. We learned that you mostly use live video to stay updated on breaking news events and experience the seminal moments of our time – things like the Pres. Obama's Inauguration, Michael Jackson’s memorial, even this week's Oprah's Book Club Event. But outside of these major events, viewing of anchor-driven, produced, live video programming on CNN.com has been very small, especially in comparison to the millions of on-demand video streams you consume on the site every day. And it's with that in mind that we've made a few changes on the video front.
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Cindy Comstock has been a familiar face to me for several years, but I didn’t know her name or her fascinating story for most of that time. I would see her once in a while at my health club, either teaching a cardio dance class or taking one and always having a great time.

One day, I heard her tell someone, “I am the mom of eight kids,” which pretty much floored all of us within earshot. Another time, she mentioned that her husband was in Iraq. It struck me that you never really know how unexpected or complicated the life of the stranger next to you may be.
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I first met Kuol Dut eight years ago - before joining CNN - during my 15 years as a newspaper reporter and editor.

It was my job then to write about immigrants and refugees, and I covered the U.S. government’s resettlement of 3,800 “lost boys” of Sudan in the United States. I did that mainly by following Kuol and three others for their first few months in metro Atlanta, Georgia. They had grown up without mothers or fathers in the midst of an awful war and came to the United States with very little knowledge of the modern world.
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