Speaking of SouthCoastToday, check out these Caspio-powered treats

• SouthCoastToday: Christmas Lights Finder
• SouthCoastToday: Santa Finder

Fred Harwood tells me that the former was seeded by the Web department, which went on an excursion to check out some displays: "It was either a fun way to be productive or a productive way to have some fun."

Amen! And happy holidays to all!

Facebook Group | Jersey Shore 2007

Advance has got some groups going on Facebook, including one for fans of the Jersey Shore.

I know a couple of shoreline areas where a similar social networking idea would be worth exploring for us.... Tie-ins with Beachcomber and OnCape Beach Guide products come immediately to mind.

Update: I found out about NJ.com's Facebook group from the tippy top of their Jersey Shore Blogs page.

Interactive mapping

Have fun, and get ready to drool: The New York Times > New York Region > Interactive Feature > New York City Transit System Is Crippled by Storm

StarTribune.com: Bridge collapse

One in an occasional series: Nice landing page for the Minneapolis bridge collapse done by StarTribune.com.

Little League pages

I happened to be at Seacoast yesterday as they launched their Little League All-Stars landing page, and now notice today that Hudson Valley has done the same. Anyone else got a similar page they want to share?

As Howard Altschiller and I were discussing Twitter, he used that as one mechanism to announce the page launch: http://twitter.com/seacoastonline

(And as a reminder, make sure you're linking to new pages from your Site Maps, so that Google/Yahoo/Ask/MSN/AOL can pick them up when you next get crawled. You should enter these new pages into the Google Site Search spreadsheet on Google Docs, so when your user searches on your site for that topic, it gets featured as a Suggested Page at the top of the results. Still confused about the latter? Give me a shout.)

Pocono: DJ, Rainbow and the bell

Speaking of traffic success this week, Pocono has been a nonstop hotbed of activity, especially on Wednesday. A local DJ decided to parrot the remark that got Don Imus in trouble, and in turn got himself fired.

• Story 1
• Story 2
  

The success was exciting from any number of angles. I was in Pocono on Wednesday, and Editor Bill Watson was spending most of his day managing the hundreds of forums posts that were streaming in all day, while the newsroom and online staff (all while I was working with a small group to answer their Saxotech and other questions and conducting the parenting guide brainstorming session... what a day for me to pick to plant myself in Stroudsburg!).

That also wasn't the only story. For those who have heard us cite the long-running Djinn Buckingham story as one of Pocono's early UGC success, wouldn't you know that Rainbow Buckingham herself became a part of Wednesday's updates. On any other day, it would have been the lead story, and the Pocono crew would have been happy for the spike.

Same is true for the late day story of a local bank taking itself public, punctuated by its CEO ringing the NASDAQ closing bell.

The result of all of that activity? Not your usual peaks and valleys. Instead, Pocono experienced a high-level of sustained traffic throughout the day:

What's better is that the audience activity has continued into today, thanks to strong follow-ups yesterday and today, the latter of which included a story about Howard Stern commenting on what was happening with the DJ in Stroudsburg.

(One suggestion, Marta... link all that DJ coverage together through the Saxotech internal links functionality, at the very least -- or is a landing page already in the works?)

Camp Guide winner

As the readers of this blog already know, San Joaquin Media Group was our Camp Guide challenge winner. But am posting here to close the loop on the previous post, and so we can share the entries with the rest of our colleagues.

Entry	Score
San Joaquin	8.367
Hudson Valley	8.200
Pocono Mountains	8.067
Southcoast	7.500
Cape Cod	3.100

One of the judges indicated that she wished she lived in Stockton, because some of the camps there sounded great for her 7-year-old. That judge also liked San Joaquin's info on fees.

Another judge: "Without a doubt, they are all quite good.... It was important to me to see the camp categories on the first page (sports, religion, nature, girl/boy/coed, overnight, etc.) and also to be able to access the camp's website easily."

Most had trouble opening Cape Cod's in IE, something Greg warned against when he submitted his entry. Given that he is deep into readying his site for its redesign launch, we were impressed that he even took a stab at the challenge.

Many thanks for the entries, and many more thanks to the judges, who turned around the scorecards very quickly in time for our monthly round of calls with the publishers earlier this week. All of the judges had their name tossed into a bowl for a drawing, and the winner, Ruth McCleod, will be receiving a Panera gift card as a prize, too.

Stay tuned for the next challenge, coming later this month!

Wi-Fi Hot Spots in the Poconos

Our runner-up in the Wi-fi Challenge is the Pocono Record, which posted its map of Wi-Fi Hot Spots in the Poconos yesterday afternoon, first with a tease from their News Updates block and later with a small barker, too.

Like a few of you, Marta and co. had a few weeks ago published an article about wi-fi hotspots in the paper and online (teased the days earlier with a UGC solicitation in their Noon Update), so they had a good base of data to start with. But the landing page, complete with the map, is a much more user-friendly way to present that data, and becomes a place to continue to build the library of knowledge about an increasingly important utility in the community.

As a runner-up prize, the Pocono staff will be receiving a Dunkin' Donuts gift card, so that they may celebrate their success with Boxes o' Joe and tasty treats.

Spring Training '07

It's raining/sleeting/freezing over where I am, but at least a few around the Ottaway empire are buried in snow today, so it's difficult to avoid daydreaming of points south. Take a stop over to recordonline.com's Spring Training '07 landing page.

It's as comprehensive a page as you'll find for following the Yankees and Mets preseason, and interacting with the writers and fellow fans.

Try to find a better landing page on the New York metro-area sites. I've not seen one yet. If you do, let me know. It's always good to learn from what others are doing.

The nice thing about what Patrick Mullen, Erik Gliedman and Matt Pepin have done here is that once everyone is on the common platform, this won't be that hard to replicate for the Red Sox in New England, for example, or the A's and Giants out West.

Let It Snow

Nice stormy weather landing page from Erik Gliedman and crew.

Pocono also had a nice tactic in their Morning Update to point to some of their existing landing pages:

If you're stuck at home it's a good day to explore this site, which has a lot more on it than just the breaking news. For information about where you live, we've got an entire section. We've also got some exhaustively detailed special reports on everything from gangs in the Poconos to the legacy of Tocks Island Dam to political protection for questionable mortgage practices in the Poconos that will take your breath away.

Cape Cod and Pocono also had a couple of good road condition text alerts, while Southcoast kicked off their school closings text alerts. I'd show them to you, but I'm still struggling with how to get the screenshots that my nifty new Treo program takes for me out of the bleepin' Treo.... Take my word for it for now.