Citizen Media: The High School Years

Clever metaphorical rundown from last month's Fast Company, itemizing UGC tools and enterprises.

www.myspace.com/newstimeslive

Add another to the growing roster:
www.myspace.com/newstimeslive

I also started one for Discover Nantucket last night:
www.myspace.com/discovernantucket

Two more MySpace profiles to check out

Stockton: www.myspace.com/ianhill

Pocono: www.myspace.com/pocono2006

Cape Cod's coverage of the Christa Worthington murder case

Run, don't walk, over to the Cape Cod Online to check out how they are tackling coverage of an ongoing story with national interest happening right in their front yard. The trial started this week.

Landing page to collect all of the coverage and provide context? Check.

Live trial blog? Check. Eric Williams (full disclosure: Eric worked for me in a previous professional endeavor) not only offers his unique style of observations from the trial, but also has in at least one of his posts fielded a question from a reader about whether anyone could attend the trial. Love the interaction.

Special video player just for the trial? Check.
Compelling video, too, which at times reverts to audio slideshow format to combine photos from the courtroom with trial audio.

Traffic? Not spiking as much as I'd expect. I'll have to check back with Editor Paul Pronovost on what kind of promotion is taking place in the paper and elsewhere. If it were me and my universe, I'd be giving it all a big specialized, highly designed treatment on the home page of the site to clearly accentuate and group all of the goodness they're offering. (In my previous life, we were big proponents with a story of this magnitude to dedicating the entire home page -- or at least most of it -- to our coverage. Leverage your strength of the moment, if you will.)

www.myspace.com/gofriday

Quick show of hands... who among us has a myspace profile, a la the Times Herald Record:
www.myspace.com/gofriday

p.s. Timely context comes courtesy of nytimes.com.

Speaking of cool Cape Cod projects...

Also stop in on Yarmouthport Astronaut Dan Burbank's photo log. Talk about giving readers a view from someplace they would otherwise not get to go!

Holiday logo

Middletown has done a nice job making its site logo festive for the upcoming occasion:

Newsrooms and Technology

CyberJournalist, reporting from a panel at ONA, lists tips to prepare your newsroom for the online world. The most interesting one, in my book, is the very last:

The Web is a place for structured data. Newsrooms are a place for unstructured information. That means reporters and editors will have to begin to gather information in structured ways if it is to make it onto the Web.

Meanwhile Citizen's Media says, "My sense is that journalism is becoming a high-tech profession — not just in using the net as a distribution mechanism but developing new software."