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!

Pimp the good stuff!

Back in my projo.com days, Managing Editor for New Media Tom Heslin coined a phrase for on-site promotion that became our mantra in the last year of working together.

"Pimp that sh*t!"

We quickly shortened it to PTS, to make it a bit more professional in mixed company, and said it to each other with a wink and a nod during almost every meeting in which we were discussing what of our new efforts should get home-page promotion.

I was reminded of PTS as I was conversing with Yoni Greenbaum via IM today. One conversation was about Year in Review features I was encountering, both on Ottaway sites and elsewhere. In particular, I was touting an effort by our SouthCoastToday crew.

Straight from Google Talk:

Yoni: I don't see the year in review package on their homepage...
Sean: Under their special reports menu? (It was in the lead position yesterday afternoon)

Yoni: nah, all I see if their men and women of the year package.

Sean: Oy. I'll dig the link out of my history....

Yoni: found it through their search

A little later, I was checking out a Google Maps mashup done by TheLedger.com in Florida, showing where to find holiday light displays. Dutifully impressed by the effort, I decided to check how they had integrated it into their site. Another exercise in frustration ensued.

Again, straight from Google Talk:

Sean: OK, that Ledger holiday lights mashup? Am I missing something, or is not linked from anywhere on their main site?

Yoni: nope

Sean: By searching Google, I found this: http://whatsnewonline.theledger.com/default.asp?item=717201

I feel a blog post coming on....

What the Google Talk thread doesn't tell you is that I hunted -- I mean, really hunted -- through TheLedger's local news, community, multimedia, interactives and other pages to find how the map was presented or linked. I couldn't even surface via their internal site search. I had to go outside to Google, and come back in, and I still am unclear on exactly how they integrated it on their site, or even promoted it, when the feature was launched.

No user is going to go through the lengths I did to find your cool stuff. It's a disservice to your staff not to showcase their hard work. It's a disservice to the reader to have that kind of utility or interesting content, and hide it under a bushel.

PTS, baby. PTS!

Breaking news alerts: What NOT to do

Check out the washingtonpost.com e-mail I just received, appended below. I am mystified at how even major news organizations don't seem to get breaking news e-mail alerts right.

What's the news conference about? Why should I care? More importantly, why should I drop everything I am trying to get done before my holiday vacation to pay attention to what is happening on washingtonpost.com? Is it breaking news simply because Bush IS holding a press conference? Maybe so, but how am I supposed to know that from what I've been sent? If that's the news hook, tell me! Give me something more than the president is going to hold a news conference. So what?

I am not clicking through to find out more. I have not been made to care enough to pay attention. I am almost tempted to unsubscribe....

---

From: washingtonpost.com [mailto:newsletter@letters.washingtonpost.com]
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2007 9:46 AM
To: Polay, Sean
Subject: News Alert: VIDEO: President Bush to Hold News Conference

If you have any difficulty viewing this newsletter click here Feedback
	News Alert 8:20 a.m. ET Thursday, December 20, 2007 VIDEO: President Bush to Hold News Conference President Bush plans to hold a White House news conference at 10:00 a.m. ET. To view live streaming video of this event on the Web, go to http://www.washingtonpost.com/postlive1. For more information, visit washingtonpost.com
E-mail Preference Page | Advertising | Subscribe to the Paper | Privacy Policy E-Mail Newsletter Services • To sign up for additional newsletter services or get help, visit the E-mail Preferences Page. • To unsubscribe, visit the E-mail Preferences Page (do not reply to this e-mail). © 2007 The Washington Post Company Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive c/o E-mail Customer Care 1515 N. Courthouse Road Arlington, VA 22201

Winter mapping idea: Best Places for Sledding

Check out: NJ Real Estate Wire » Best Places for Sledding in Essex County NJ.

Add a mashup map, some UGC to solicit user favorites and comments on already mapped ones, and you've got something more interactive that will last you all winter long!

YouTubeHD?

An update from Gizmodo for those who are hoping the YouTube video quality might improve: What YouTubeHD Might Look Like.

As indicated in the post, the stream is choppy (understatement), but it's nice to see that there's work afoot and potential quality improvement on the horizon.

Earth to publishers: Stop trying to exert so much control

The headline alone on this AP story on NJ.com is enough to send me into orbit: News Web sites seek more search control

When, oh when, are publishers going to realize that the more we try to exert control over our content, the more likely we are to lose control.

By the way, losing control over the distribution of our content is not a bad thing, people. The easier we make it for readers to access our content -- regardless of platform -- the more likely it will be that we gain and retain readers via whatever channel our content was acquired.

Roadblocks are exactly that. Pretty hard to grow audience when we throw up a bunch of stop signs and detours.

UGC should not be ostracized

A must-read column from Steve Outing's monthly offering on Editor & Publisher: An Important Lesson About Grassroots Media

The really important paragraphs:

Take a look at some news organizations that are soliciting and trying to attract citizen content. Most of the time it's put in a separate website or webpage, off to the side and separated from the professionally produced content. That strategy alone, in my opinion, dooms the citizen content to obscurity. Some people will find it, but my bet is that it will never get significant traffic.

For example, it's common after a natural disaster for a news website to request that eyewitnesses share photos or blog about their experiences. Typically that content is aggregated in a page with all the other amateur submissions. Meanwhile, there's another, separate page for photos of the disaster taken by professional photojournalists. Flipping through the amateur photos is arduous to most of us; you have to scan a lot of crap to find the few great images.

That's the wrong approach, in my view. The best way to leverage those eyewitness photos is to have editors identify the best ones, then add those to a presentation of the best images of the disaster, period -- whether they're from the pros or the eyewitnesses.

That's really what this whole social/grassroots/citizen thing is all about, y'know! News organizations need to stop thinking of themselves as islands, and reach out and grab all the other relevant content that's being published around them. The news website that covers the local wildfires exclusively with staff content is hopelessly lost in the web 2.0 environment. The news site that gathers, identifies and filters all the wildfire coverage from local bloggers and other sources -- and adds that in with its own staff coverage -- understands where it should be going.

Check out: Is there good traffic reporting online?

Following on my Twitter-related post from yesterday, give a read to Yoni's ideas for online traffic reporting.

It really is all about leveraging the strengths of the available platforms, isn't it?

Twitter your br(e)aking news

Some may recall the idea I've floated in various conversations about how Twitter could be an effective tool for commuter traffic updates online?

Steve Outing expands on the idea in his latest E-Media Tidbits post: The Twitter Disaster

Amen, Steve. The end game, in my mind, is placing our content on the platforms where our current and potential audience prefer to consume us. This is something I've been advocating since 2005, by the way, but is all the more true in the social networking, Web 2.0 world in which we're operating as we head into 2008.

This will seem like sacrilege, coming from a person whose success is measured by the audience metrics of our Web sites, but when it comes to content distribution, driving traffic back to our core newspaper.com sites is a secondary benefit (not that there's anything wrong with that benefit, mind you). The more important result is that by pushing our content in ways that makes it easiest for many different audience segments to consume it, we've performed the ultimate "job-to-be-done."

If I put on my user hat for a second, I'll repeat my point from an earlier post that Twitter has become my primary means of following news updates from New York Times and ESPN, not to mention our own Pocono Record. I wish more sites were on the bandwagon.

Blogs can be sources, too

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.

Ads as widgets (or vice versa)

While reading a story on Wicked Local Bourne this evening, I encountered the following ad (RSS-based readers should click through to see the ad):

Get this widget!

Of course, I clicked on "Get this widget!" first, because I have widgets on the brain lately. That made me wonder whether the ad was really that effective.

I quickly realized that it was more effective than a "standard" ad. Get some good creative in that widget, and you have enabled it to not only be clickable for more information on your brand, product or offer, but you've also turned the ad itself into a viral marketing mechanism.

Now how much would you pay!

Meta tag and alias reinforcement

Don't just take my, Yoni's and Ken's word for it: There's ample evidence out there in SEO-blog land regarding the importance of meta tags and aliases and how they contribute to keyword density of your pages and the call-to-action text that shows up in the search engine's themselves.

Witness today's post by Miles Price in Search Engine Journal: 12 Basic On-Site SEO Tactics for Optimized Results.

1. The Meta Keywords, Description and Robots tag — Google used description copy to market your site in its results, treat this as optimized sales copy. Make sure your sitemap.xml page is CONSTANTLY called up to the search engines

2. The Title Tag - The MOST important aspect of on-page SEO, just take our word for it...

5. The URL — The subdirectory folder and page of content should be SEO’d (i.e. http://domain.com/real-estate/real-estate-marketing-ideas.com would fetch a high ranking for a page dedicated to real estate marketing ideas - especially with many highly authoritative, relevant, deep in-bound links)

TV is killing us with convergence and self-promotion

At one point during Game 3 of the World Series last night, there was a trivia interlude, asking viewers which of four Rockies held the franchise record for home runs. To participate, viewers were told to text their choice to Fox, or log onto FoxSports.com to vote.

Now, at the time, I thought that was pretty silly. Vote for something you could first find the answer to with a couple of clicks on the Web?

While the specific question might have been silly, the aim was not: Leverage the strengths of other mediums to further engage the audience, and expose them to other Fox products.

(Oddly, though, I could not unearth historical stats on FoxSports.com. Had to learn elsewhere that the answer is Todd Helton.)

I have been struck lately by how well TV sports broadcasters do, through spoken words, tickers, on-screen bugs and more, to tout their online and mobile products. The Red Sox pregame show on the local Fox affiliate last night included viewer comments scrolling across the bottom of the screen. Watch any Sunday morning football preview show, and they are answering viewers' fantasy football questions via the ticker, and actively seek such questions through lead-ins or close-outs of segments. A local Patriots weekly magazine show included promotional spots for online-only programming during the week and on game days.

Contrast that with my experience with reading the November/December issue of Yankee Magazine this morning. There was a good story about the transformation of Pittsfield, MA, into a can't-miss city on any visit to Western Massachusetts. Once I reached the end of the story, I made myself backtrack through the pages, because I was sure I must have missed a tease to go online to see more photos or share my Pittsfield travel stories. No such luck.

That would have been the elementary step. An interactive map might have been an intermediate step, showing all the different locales discussed in the article (there was quite an extensive list at the end of the print story). Pulling in ratings and reviews from Yelp and other sites might have been the more advanced step. Bonus points could have been achieved if they had their own ratings and reviews system and they solicited users to participate.

So I went online, to see if the Yankee staff did anything to enhance the online version of the story, and maybe just missed the opportunity to tease from print. Nay. The story is not even online yet.

I throw up my hands in disgust. How can we expect our audiences to engage with us and our products if we won't engage ourselves in stretching our thinking and leveraging the strengths of our platforms?

Your Guide to Virtual Worlds

I think this would have to be considered a 201 course: Your Guide to Virtual Worlds

Twelve types of effective blog posts

Rich Gordon offers up a Blogging 101 in his Readership Institute post: Twelve types of effective blog posts

Please share with anyone blogging -- or thinking about blogging -- in your newsroom. We're all never too old to go back to school.

Not Your Father's Press Release

So it appears that the business world is starting to realize that a press releases doesn't have to simply be a piece of paper or e-mail and a few posed photos.

Ford Motor Company recently announced the 2008 Ford Focus with what might just be the very first Social Media press release. In addition to the traditional text release:

their site (yes a website!) also included an rss feed:

a Flickr photo gallery:A YouTube gallery with an embeddable player:

Suggested Tags:
And much, much more.

I think it is worth noting that this is FORD, not the most forward-thinking company out there and one that has been struggling financially. To me this effort indicates their recognition that there is now more then one way to get your message out; that you need to maximize your distribution; that what worked before won't work now. Is it selling more cars? I don't know. But it does have people talking.

So what do you think?

A smile for Unicef

A nice UGC idea, that could be loosely tied to Halloween:

Adverblog: A smile for Unicef

Brand Your YouTube Page

As more of you use YouTube for video distribution and promotion, I wanted to suggest that you switch your accounts from the default YouTuber to Director. This FREE change in what YouTube refers to as Channel Type will allow you to add custom items and logos on your Profile page. Basically it allows you to make your YouTube homepage consistent with your overall branding.

To make this switch, simply sign into YouTube and then go to the "Channel Info" section (http://www.youtube.com/my_profile) of your account and click on the "change channel type" link.

Don’t forget to press the Update Channel button before navigating away from the page otherwise your change won’t be registered.

Make sure that you have given your channel a title and description. This information is entered in the Channel Info page. Your description can be something as simple as RCA Record’s:

The latest videos from RCA Records!

If you want to promote all your products you can provide a description similar to that of the Universal Music Group:

Universal Music Group (UMG) Music Video Channel.

Universal Music Group consists of record labels Decca Music Group, Deutsche Grammophon, Interscope Geffen A&M Records, Geffen Records, Island Def Jam Music Group, Lost Highway Records, MCA Nashville, Mercury Nashville, Mercury Records, Philips, Polydor Records, Universal Music Latino, Universal Motown Records Group, Universal South Records and Verve Music Group as well as a multitude of record labels owned or distributed by its record company subsidiaries around the world.

This is also where you can include a link to your homepage or other portions of your site or even contest or event. For example if you visit the NBA’s YouTube page, you’ll see that they are currently looking for people to vote for the Fan Plays of the Year.

Channel Design allows you to customize the look and feel of your homepage in addition to delete or add the types of content visitors will see. At the very least, I would encourage all of you to upload your logos, make the color scheme visually consistent with your own sites and remove content options that might just clutter your page.

To get some ideas of how other sites are customizing their pages, check out some of these links.

You could even do something like what Al Jazeera English did on their page, and get the most out of your background image.

Once you’re done designing your YouTube page, don’t forget to upload your videos and for that I encourage you all to use HeySpread since it will post to YouTube and 15 other video sharing sites. For more on that, see my previous posts here and here.

If you have any question or comments please don’t hesitate to reach out to me and once you’ve completed your page, please share it with everyone.

Another Thought on YouTube

With all the talk last week about YouTube, copyright, credibility and impact I thought it was interesting to look at how UC Berkeley was treating the site.

For those of you familiar with the University, you likely already know that it has long embraced the web, since last year it has offered podcasts of its lectures on iTunes and earlier this month it went a step further and started publishing lectures on YouTube.

At http://youtube.com/ucberkeley, you’ll find a heavily customized page that takes advantage of the functionality that comes with a “Directors Account” -- including custom items and logos. Videos on their page include tours of campus, full lectures and interviews with staff. Currently the topics of study featured include chemistry, physics and biology.

The university explained its decision to post to YouTube this way.

"UC Berkeley on YouTube will provide a public window into university life, academics, events and athletics, which will build on our rich tradition of open educational content for the larger community," said Christina Maslach, UC Berkeley's vice provost for undergraduate education in a statement.

I don’t know how they are gauging success, but these are their posted YouTube stats:

Subscribers: 4,580
Channel Views: 340,889 (the channel seems to have gone live in May)

Now obviously we’re not running colleges or universities, but I think some of that “public window” that Maslach spoke of above rings true for what we do as well.

More then anything else, I hope seeing the way UC Berkeley, the various Presidential candidates or CBS.com are turning to YouTube and using it will help you all work through some of your concerns about incorporating the site into your overall strategy.

Kapler's corner -- Gabe Kapler offers his thoughts on the Red Sox in the playoffs - Boston.com

Nice idea, Boston.com: Kapler's corner -- Gabe Kapler offers his thoughts on the Red Sox in the playoffs - Boston.com. There's some nice inside-baseball (pardon the pun) stuff in there that only someone like Kapler could provide. Love that!

One nitpicky critique: Where's the RSS feed? How can I subscribe to the blog in my RSS reader, where I consume most of my blog-like interests, if you don't allow my Firefox to automatically detect the feed in the page, nor offer me an RSS link somewhere in the sidelines of the blog? Or how can I add it to Facebook? Or my iGoogle? You know... the platforms where I spend a significant portion of my online time these days?

For what it's worth, the feed is not available on their sports RSS page either.

Maybe my standards are too high, and I'm too much of a stickler for these details. I suppose it's nice to know we're not alone in trying to corral the basics. Boston.com has some basics to tackle, too.