StuandMikey

Here is the car review video Fred was talking about yesterday:

MySpace as a viral marketing tool

As a follow-up to this week's discussion regarding MySpace and other places we need to be playing...

I noticed on my MySpace page today that my "friends" Go! in Middletown and 209 Music in Stockton added blog posts in the last couple of days to their page. Because I have added them as my friends, I see their new material on my personal dashboard:

Voila! Content distribution in MySpace.



I'm guessing that we should add a session like "How to Create a MySpace page and Ways to Use It" to yesterday's brainstorm notes from the Online Editors' conference?

One of the sessions that got cut at the last minute from this week's conference was Ken and I talking about Web 2.0 and how to leverage others' technologies for marketing and content purposes. We talked about it some (YouTube players in story pages, for example), but I'll also hang onto that as an idea for an upcoming conference call/WebEx session.

Wired News: Italy Hails Laundry Text Alerts

In doing some research today, I came across this Sept. item from Wired: Italy Hails Laundry Text Alerts

Julien Buratto and Davide Bongianni..., a project manager and graphic designer respectively at a Milan web company, have launched a website called stendibiancheria.net (Italian for "hang out the laundry") that pairs a mathematical formula with forecasts from weather.com to arrive at a "laundry index."

In late August, just in time for the meteorological uncertainties of fall, they added a free text-messaging service so users know when it's time to high-tail it home and pull in the clothes. About 600 subscribers have signed up so far.

CLearly filling a void in Milan "Jobs to be Done."

Competition watch

AmericanTowns.com
was among the featured sites in a NYT article today (so, too, were our friends at Baristanet) about hyperlocal sites in the greater NYC area.

Among the featured towns on AmericanTowns:
Nantucket
Provincetown
Stockton
New Paltz
Carmel
Poughkeepsie

But click on any state on the AmericanTowns home page, and you can see pages budding for non-featured towns, such as my favorite town, Sandwich.

The Power of UGC

The text alert came across today @ 4:27 p.m. while we were having the monthly call with the Middletown folks. That drew us to the site, where we noticed this comment posted at the end of the article.

Rebecca928
January 09, 2007 03:32 PM
I work for Dr. Luck right across the street from where the accident happend i seen the accident happen and was the first one to call for help. I would like to say that we are all praying that everone makes it through this. I dont know how many people are going to have to get hurt before they do something about this intersection on route 208 and spring mountain rd.Are prayers are with you.

Now THAT is news as conversation with the community.

Some Words of Advice for Small Newspapers

In case you missed it, Steve Outing writes today about 10 things publishers and editors should be doing to keep their heads above water in today's media landscape.

Society of News Design: New Media Quick Course — 2007

Not that anyone has a deep-seeded desire to go to Muncie, Ind., much less in the middle of winter, but if you've got folks proficient in Flash, this course could be a good way for them to take their multimedia story-telling skills to the next level.