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Gannett NJ Digital 2010 Roles
This is a quick overview of the Digital 2010 Roles initiative we rolled out across the state last month.
CourierPostOnline.com presentation I gave to the Camden Rotary today
At the crack of dawn this morning, I treked into Camden to give a short overview of the Courier-Post website, CourierPostOnline.com, as well as some cool ways that people in the community can use it. Here is is. Enjoy.
Fun with Keynote, Hyperlocal, and WordCamp NYC
Last weekend I spoke at WordCamp NYC about what we’re building out on InJersey. WordPress is the software that makes InJersey possible, and my talk focused on how we use it here, as well as how we employ BuddyPress to help build up and communicate with our network of community bloggers.
It was a great session — despite being held at 5pm, very near to the end of the day, when I imagine most attendants were more interested in getting their drink on than in learning about hyperlocal journalism. Still, I’m still flattered that we had such great attendance and such engaging questions. Thanks to everyone who turned out, and please, don’t be shy about shooting me any and all questions about how we use WordPress.
Here are the slides from my talk:
One of the things that Day 1 of WordCamp has inspired me to do is upgrade BuddyPress to the latest version. Please excuse any wonky behavior while I set out to do this in the next day.
SeeClickFix Watch Area Demo … my latest random side-project
Lately I’ve been taking on a few side projects for fun. Alright, maybe “fun” is pushing it — “challenging” is probably more apt.
The latest of these is a video I created for a site called SeeClickFix. I’ve been working with these guys a lot lately, getting up a variety of widgets and embedded maps onto the InJersey blogs (Cherry Hill, Collingswood, Flemington, Freehold, Madison, Vineland, and Somerset Hills). The maps allow you to submit reports on potholes, graffiti, and other things in your neighborhood that need fixing. What I did was create a short video for them that explains how users can also create “Watch Areas” — which in turn allow them to be notified every time somebody submits an issue in their area. This is how, say, the Public Works Dept in a town can get notified about each and every new pothole.
Just my way of saying thanks to the developers there for all the hard work they’ve been doing to get their snazzy new widgets fully compatible with InJersey and the Gannett NJ newspaper sites.
PageYield: The new metric for measuring online audience engagement
There was a great post on TechCrunch today about how the redesign of Yahoo has helped push up the time spent on the homepage by 20 percent. But what I found interesting wasn’t so much the effect of the tweaks Yahoo made as the quantification of their success afterward. Specifically, the idea of PageYield.
The whole focus of the redesign, and across Yahoo in general, says Bhat is to increase what he calls PageYield. The yield of a page on Yahoo is measure of how engaged consumers are with that page. (As opposed to PageRank, which is how Google scores pages on the Web in its search results). PageYield is a measure of how much time is spent on each Yahoo page and how many pageviews it gets, but also how much downstream traffic the page generates, and how often people come back.
So often when we look at building websites, we’re focussed on metrics like page views and unique visitors and time on site. But I think this concept of PageYield gets to the heart of what a website really should be aiming to do: get users to interact with it. A great page on a news site gets users to read an article, play a video, make a comment, and share to Facebook or Twitter. If the user just skims the page and moves on, so what? Sure, both count as page views and eyeballs, but if the engaged user is infinitely better.
And not just from a usability standpoint. It also makes sense if your website has an ad-supported business model. If they’re engaged with everything on the page, it follows that they’re far more engaged with advertisements, too.
Hip hip hooray for Hyperlocal events in November
November is shaping up to have a slew of big hyperlocal events. After launching InJersey and attempting to pilot Gannett NJ’s efforts in this arena, I’m going to try to make to all of these. Of course, given that it seems there’s a new event every few days, it’ll be challenging. At some point next month, I’m going to have to actually try to work.
Anyway, here are the biggies on my list:
- Nov. 9 – New Media Women Entrepreneurs, Washington D.C.: A day-long gathering of blockbuster speakers, all of them women, and almost all of them working on hyperlocal news sites. Although I may not be able to make it to D.C. for the event, I’d particularly love to hear Debbie Galant, of Baristanet.com, and Lisa Williams, of Placeblogger.com.
- Nov. 11 – Hypercamp, NYC: This is one I absolutely won’t miss. I’ve been working with Jeff Jarvis and his team at CUNY (“New Business Models for News”) to set up a day-long event devoted to how to improve the quality of hyperlocal news sites, and also how to monetize them once they’re built. Should be an amazing lineup of speakers, including Jarvis himself.
- Nov. 14-15 – WordCamp NYC: While not technically hyperlocal, since InJersey is all built on WordPress MU and BuddyPress, as are most of the blog-based hyperlocal sites out there, this is going to be a very important event for me. It’s arguably the biggest and best WordCamp event outside of the San Fran one.
- Nov. 18 – Citizen Journalism Conference, Monmouth U, West Long Branch, NJ: I’m scheduled to speak at this free half-day event being put on by the Citizens Campaign, a non-profit aiming to help promote citizen journalism and civic engagement. My panel’s discussion: “The New Media Climate: How the internet is transforming journalism and its impact on local government & politics.”
Should be a wild couple weeks. If you’re planning to go to any of these as well, drop me an email and let me know.
Fun with Social Networking
Despite suffering from a nasty two-day-old fever, I managed to drag myself out of bed and up to East Brunswick today for a live video chat about social networking — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and all that good stuff. We even managed to get a few questions about hyperlocal blogs, which I suspect may have come from my wonderful, softball-lobbing, InJersey-loving colleagues.
Loren Fisher, the editor for MyCentralJersey.com, interviewed me, and we used LiveStream’s Procaster app in order to do the video/screencast switching. Enjoy!
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MoJo DoJo
- Getting inspired by a TweetUp December 15, 2009Last Thursday I attended my first TweetUp at Tortilla Press in Collingswood. It was a great event and has, among other things, inspired me to bring more Twitter goodness into other areas of my online life -- including, for starters, this long-neglected blog. As you can see, I've launched a new WordPress theme by the [...] […]
- Live Video of Cherry Hill Candidates Debate today October 21, 2009Tune in at 7pm to watch our live stream here. […]
- Wikipedia Articles Appear in Google News Results July 28, 2009You might see some Wikipedia articles appearing in your Google News searches. Cue aghast reactions. Really, though, it's not that big of a deal. Internet users gain their info from a variety of sources - never from just one - unlike the way traditional newspapers fed their news content to their readers. Besides I passed biology [...] […]
- Facebook traffic approaching Google levels June 9, 2009To anyone who doubts the importance of Facebook in the web economy these days, that headline alone should be reason enough to make you a believer. According to Compete in the last month alone, traffic to Facebook.com grew 8 percent, reaching 82.9 million unique visitors. As TechCrunch points out, it's almost beside the point to compare [...] […]
- And the fedoras in England say ‘Cheers!’ June 5, 2009Happy Friday! "Media workers are the heaviest drinking professionals in England, consuming the equivalent of more than four bottles of wine or more than 19 pints of beer a week, according to government research." via Media has heaviest drinkers, poll finds | Media | The Guardian. Can't refute that. But what about the U.S. stats? […]
- Slogan Call: Need some hyperlocal help June 4, 2009We've been working long and hard for several months now on what we're calling our "hyperlocal project." Yes, indeedy, more town-centric citizen journalist goodness. Trust us, it'll be awesome. More on that in the weeks to come. In the mean time, we're still polishing up the site, and one bit of spit shine that would really [...] […]
- Larry Mendte sues Inquirer, Daily News June 4, 2009This article courtesy of MARYCLAIRE DALE, Associated Press. Cheers! PHILADELPHIA - Convicted former news anchor Larry Mendte has filed a defamation suit against The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News and several of their columnists. Mendte says he was defamed in coverage of what he calls a "romantic" relationship with co-anchor Alyci […]
- AP reveals fair use to be fake, fake, fake June 4, 2009Go go creative commons and go go licensing fees. MediaShift takes a look at iffy fair use rules and the wobbly future of news copyright on the Web through the epic toils of AP's legal staff. I've always tried to follow the fair-use-doesn't-exist rule. The Copyright Act stipulations take too long to translate and are a little [...] […]
- News tidbits I bet you didn’t know June 4, 2009Did you know there's a newspaper (or a few) per continent including Antarctica? Or how about the lyrics to "The Washington Post March" (born and raised in Fairfax, Va. and even I didn't know that!) Check out this list of nine things you probably didn't know about the news. My favorite: "You've probably heard the New York [. […]
- Philadelphia Bulletin bites the dust June 3, 2009Done as of yesterday. "The Bulletin retained its predecessor’s famous slogan, 'In Philadelphia Nearly Everybody Reads the Bulletin'..." via RIP Philadelphia Bulletin | Newspaper Death Watch. Check out the Bulletin's website here. Will they make something of it? Doesn't look promising... [Editor's note: Updated 1:15 p.m.] […]
Go Go Gadget
- FLY BENEATH THE SEA February 3, 2010Check out the new toy being deliverd this month to the private Caribbean island of Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Unlimited. For $25,000 you can rent Branson's underwater airplane for a week. ''Unlike all conventional submersibles which use ballast to sink in the water, the DeepFlight submersibles uses downward ‘lift’ on the wings to fly down t […]
- WHAT DOES SJ HAVE THAT NY DOESN’T: 4G January 18, 2010- Was watching the playoffs this weekend with friends when that old Philly vs. New York saw reared its ugly head: Philly and South Jersey feeling second rate when ever it compares itself, or whenever we're compared to New York. What a croc. But in that vein, its worth pointing out something we've got that New York [...] […]
- Jack Bauer’s calling…. on Nexus One? January 18, 2010- I think the Day 8 season premier last night of '24' found Jack Bauer using a Nexus One cell phone. Did anyone else spy the familiar silver-ringed camera lens on the back of his mobile while he was talking to CTU when the helicopter exploded? Maybe Jack was trying to reach Google's customer [...] […]
- TIME FOR ‘24′: What’s Jack Bauer got on his wrist this year January 15, 2010- A new season of '24' brings Jack back for 2 hours Sunday night (and 2 more on Monday) to set the stage for the season. If you wanna be like Jack, while you're ducking and reloading and running from place to place to place, you'll need a good watch. After all, in Bauer time, [...] […]
- GOOGLE FLAGSHIP SUPERPHONE CRASHES ON ARRIVAL January 13, 2010- Oh, this isn't good. Going straight into consumer caution mode here: Nexus One may have a rampant hardware defect. And Google is providing woeful customer service, according to reports in most all media - blogosphere, techpress, mainstream press. And Nexus One has the highest costs of any subsidized phone. Strange that Google claims this phone 'r […]
- NEXUS ONE TROUBLE: Google should search itself January 11, 2010- Reports are growing that right out of the box, the Nexus One is having issues. First issue is that people can't get them out of the box: Mobile phone users are complaining that Google isn't shipping fast enough. And people who received one, they're having real trouble getting support. Google's response to these issues: You have to [...] […]
- The Christmas Tree Rocket January 9, 2010We're taking down the Christmas tree today and right about now I wish I had studied my differential calculus a bit more. Wonder if I could do that with my washing machine. […]
- NEXUS NONE: Google phone released January 6, 2010-Listen closely and ... pffffft ... you can hear air coming out of the new Nexus One smartphone from Google. Great Gods, when it was released for sale Tuesday afternoon, the Earth didn't quake, clouds didn't part and angels didn't sing. You only heard Google touting it. To cut through 2009's relentless hype and verbiage surrounding this [ […]
- Google Phone approved by FCC December 14, 2009- The controversial Google Phone was publicly approved by the FCC today. Thanks to all the GadgBloggers who have been wrestling mightily with this for some time, but the expected game changer of a Data Only phone is not present here. Not yet, anyhow. Here's some pictures courtesy of engadget. Images purport that this mobile has 3D [...] […]
- Nuts to AT&T and its no-tether, no-MMS ways June 9, 2009Just about tech blog in the U.S. is currently bitching about yesterday's news that AT&T will NOT be supporting many of the newest features on the iPhone 3G, like MMS and tethering. Instead of echoing their gripes, I'd instead like to kindly point you to a petition to get Ma Bell to please, please join the [...] […]