Morris Digital Works has a new product: Fanatic Zone — a community-based sports site.

One idea I like that immediately jumps out at me is they’ve created boxes of content around Flickr and YouTube submissions tagged “world cup.” What a smart way to leverage open source journalism.

I think it’s also brave because Morris has its own photo-sharing application called Spotted.. Rather than rely on the less well used Spotted, Morris wasn’t afraid to go where the action is for the big sports story of the day.

Another nice innovation — beyond “submit a story,” they’ve added, “Submit an RSS Feed.” Smart stuff.

Via Instapundit, a quote from long-tail guru Chris Anderson that deserves consideration:

Now we have armies of amateurs, happy to work for free. Call it the Age of Peer Production. From Amazon.com to MySpace to craigslist, the most successful Web companies are building business models based on user-generated content. This is perhaps the most dramatic manifestation of the second-generation Web. The tools of production, from blogging to video-sharing, are fully democratized, and the engine for growth is the spare cycles, talent, and capacity of regular folks, who are, in aggregate, creating a distributed labor force of unprecedented scale. . . . But it’s a mistake to equate peer production with anticapitalism. This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere.

A good Web site is a partnership between the people who build and maintain it, and the people who visit it.

More than a year ago, I started thinking about newspaper-sponsored free wi-fi. In Ventura, the coverage area was so suburban, I wasn’t sure there was a natural fit. I saw it more as a metro play.

Free wi-fi is something I looked at in Ventura, but the geographic area of the DMA was large, and even for some place as confined as downtown Ventura, it’s a tough task and a bit pricy, according to my research. I shelved the idea in favor of other priorities.

It is still a project that I find mildly interesting. I see opportunities for reader engagement, branding and advertising. But technology is changing so fast, so many other hot spots are popping up, the time for newspapers to take a lead in this market may already be passing.

Paid Content reports that The Pilot in North Carolina is the latest newspaper to take a stab at this idea (I’m trying to remember now which other paper was planning free wi-fi a month or two ago).

As a matter of curious coincidence: I’m writing this while sitting in Dagny’s, a coffee shop in downtown Bakersfield with free wireless.

Via Lost Remote, I get word that Borrell has a new report out. It claims that while 77 percent of the potential home buyers use the Web, a mere 15 percent of the advertising dollars are flowing online.

Yes, this is an opportunity.

It’s an opportunity for newspapers for four reasons.

• First, strong pre-existing relationships with Realtors;
• Second, real estate is a highly fragmented market online in many regions, meaning a strong newspaper effort has a chance to corner the market;
• Third, the Web is a natural place to search for real estate — it just works so much better for finding and viewing listings than any other medium … real estate and the Web were made for each other;
• Fourth, newspapers can leverage their market leadership among consumers and their superior ability to create content to “feed the dream” of home ownership, or of moving up;

Feeding the dream is very important, something most online real estate sites fail to do. A content-rich site is the answer.

Of course, a real estate site isn’t just about homes for sale. Renters need a place to search, too.

Once you establish a brand as a comprehensive, reliable, trusted source of housing information, you should be able to own your local market online.

Of course, building a great real estate site doesn’t come cheap. To do it right, you need a robust listing application, a strong new homes product, a flexible rental search, a strong sales staff, and lots and lots of content, both evergreen and current. You need school and crime databases, geographic and topical information, neighborhood profiles, people profiles, home buying information, and plenty of multimedia. And don’t forget marketing, and your marketing should include frequent consumer-centric contests.

But look at the opportunity.

LATER: Online News Squared has a related post.

I found this thanks to my referrer log: Eric Siegmund complements howardowens.com because the blog entries are on the left hand side of the page, which means they load first, after advertising.

A good design rule-of-thumb is to give your reader something to read while the rest of your page loads. … I’m not suggesting that you re-work your layout to put all your miscellany on the right column, like Howard Owens has done — but it’s not a bad idea.

That aspect of usability wasn’t on my mind when I redesigned the site last. My only thought was that this site doesn’t exist to make me money and it’s never going to be an attractive place for businesses to place ads (too little traffic), and I know that users start with the left side of Web pages, so that’s where I should put my content. Recently, there was an eye track study that supported this layout philosophy.

But here’s the question: If you run a site where advertising is critical, should you put the advertising rail on the left side?

I can’t think of any newspaper sites that dedicate the left column to advertising, but I think it’s worth considering.

Any where from 40 to 50 percent of a local news site’s audience is there for the advertising, not the news. Advertising pays the bills. Advertising needs to be more effective. Advertising should look like its part of the site, not grafted in. Your classifieds and verticals should be very easy to find. To me, that all adds up to putting the advertising rail on the left side. The content still gets prominent center play, and on a newspaper site, you’re generally going to have very compelling elements that draw the eye to the content, so does it really need to take up the most valuable real estate on a Web page?

The Google AdSense hot zones chart supports this notion, I think (though no news site publisher in his right mind is going to put ads in the hottest zone of all, right in the middle of the page).

I’d love to hear what other people think.

Jay Rosen has received a memo from “the people formerly known as the audience.” It is a worthwhile summary of the major perspective shift digital media has wrought as we speak.

John Battelle notes that Google took out a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal advertising for sales people. He snarks: “What, great sales people don’t just type “sales jobs” into Google?!”

Battelle goes on to make a more serious point about the irony of both Google and MSN using print for recruitment. Those WSJ ads don’t come cheap.

Here’s the rub: Sales positions are the hardest to fill. I’ve tried to hire for a few sales positions over the years, and I’ve ever only really been satisfied with one of the people I hired or inherited. Hiring print sales people is a bit easier, but in this job market, it’s tough. Online is tougher, and online is where newspapers really need their best sales people right now.

Steve Outing, in his latest E&P column, addresses the issue of “news as a conversation.”

Outing starts out with comments on stories, a feature I’ve advocated for a couple of years. We did this in Ventura with great success, and some trouble. The trouble convinced me “virtual communities” were the answer. Of course, the term “virtual community” dates me, but this is what we called it when I started RVClub.com; however, my fascination with creating community online really goes back East County Online. In Ventura, we needed an effective way to control the bad actors. The best we could do it (with available resources) was tie comments to registration, which has proven somewhat effective, but I think a robust profile system will help foster accountability and a stronger sense of belonging to a community.

I don’t know of any newspaper site that has really implemented it, yet, quite what I have in mind.

I favor attaching comments to stories over building out a hosted blog community first. Current events are what drive conversations, and people need to be invited into that conversation. In a sea of blogs, it takes an exceptional blogger to attract an audience blind. But with comments, people are focused on topics, not personality, and can come to learn about fellow community members through discussion and debate. This is what fosters community, and will ultimately make user blogs more successful.

Outing has a number of good ideas.

• Specifically ask for reader comments in the story
• Pose questions in the story for readers to answer
• Ask in print, not just online
• Let readers subscribe (I say e-mail and RSS) to conversations
• When someone comments, they automatically become subscribed to the conversation (I say have an opt-in/opt-out feature for each conversation)
• Enhance comments with multimedia (harder to manage, but possible)
• Let readers upload photos to comments
• Add a most-commented-on feature to the Web site.
• Add photos of users to comments (or even an icon they choose)

You should also be able to click-through to a user’s profile and see his or history of comments.

A Slashdot-like feature allowing users to rate comments and commenters would also help, and of course there should be a mechanism to report abuse.

I would also ad that a community manager is needed — somebody who watches the interaction, provides guidance for proper behavior and even chimes in with an opinion or two — somebody that users can see as a real person and identify with. This gives that person not only civic authority, but persuasive authority to help keep the community running smoothly. Good communities need feeding and weeding.

Outing has never been a fan of newspaper site registration, but in this context he clearly sees the importance of registration to manage user profiles. Outing favors allowing anonymous comments, however. I disagree, to a degree. I don’t support complete anonymity on news pages. There needs to be a level of accountability where news managers can reasonably (within the the limits that on the Net people can and do lie about their identity, though there are ways of managing this) identify users. Registered users should be able to hide their true identify behind an online persona, but complete anonymity rarely fosters thoughtful or useful conversations. Allowing complete anonymity is just a flame war waiting to happen.

Of course, I think some day newspaper sites may be able to do away with registration, or at least lower the threshold of stories read before registration kicks in — and user profiles, comments, blogs and other UGC will all become part of what makes it possible, along with sign ups for useful services, like a multitude of e-mail newsletters, SMS and other mobile services, business ratings and feedback, etc.

So what’s killing newspapers?

David Berkowitz notes correctly that it isn’t search engines (or even any aspect of the Internet). Readership decline started long before there was ARPANET (Berkowitz didn’t go back far enough in his research — readership decline started in the 1920s).

I’ve long been of the mind that while the Internet poses many new challenges for newspapers, it opens up just as many opportunities.

To me, it isn’t newspapers that need saving, but the media companies that publish them, so that newspaper journalism (improved by multimedia and user-generated content) can continue. And it’s not just the content that matters. It’s the advertising, too. That, too, is part of the community that newspapers serve and the vital service they provide. Newspapers play an important role in helping local economies thrive.

The first time I ever heard of Dallas Frazier was when I somehow found out he wrote “Elvira.” That was a big hit for the Oak Ridge Boys back in 1980. I hadn’t heard a song like that in a long time. I was no fan (and never have been) of the overly commercialized Oak Ridge Boys, but “Elvira” was a damn interesting song, and fun to sing (I’ve been to enough karaoke bars to know how popular it is among that crowd).

What I didn’t know is that Frazier also wrote one of my childhood favorites — “Ally Op.” If you know both songs, you will immediately recognize the similarities.

Over the years, I’d seen Frazier’s name pop up here and there because he’s written a long string of hit songs.

What I didn’t know until I moved to Bakersfield was that he grew up in my current home town. If you listen to enough of his music, you can catch some Bakersfield sound influences — driving beats, guitar heavy licks, in particular.

The other day I was downtown on 19th Street with a little time to kill waiting for a friend, so I popped into a used record store. There I found a Dallas Frazier record — Tell It Like It Is (interestingly, the title song is listed as a Frazier composition on the LP cover, but AllMusic.com says it’s by George Davis and Lee Diamond), and the BMI database agrees, and credits Frazier with 481 songs). The Frazier record was priced $1.99 and the shopkeep offered it to me for a buck.

That was one well-spent dollar.

Frazier’s songs on this record are more blusy than country, and right in line with the style of Elvira, maybe not quite as silly, and the performances certainly are not as polished as the Oak Ridge Boys (thank god). There is much here that reminds me of Sean Costello. There’s plenty of material here for performers looking for songs to cover, including “Don’t Come Knocking On My Door,” “My Woman Up and Gone” (the song most suitable for Costello), “Ain’t Nothin’ Shakin’ But the Leaves.”

HGTV has launched a new online marketplace. It’s a place for small businesses to reach HGTV.com’s large audience, and a way for HGTV to make money from products mentioned on its shows.

The idea of aggregating advertiser inventory is a promising model for regional media Web sites, i.e., newspaper sites. Travidia and HarvestInfo, among others, offer these sorts of products. Unfortunately, it’s a hard sell because most local advertisers don’t have online inventory and online sales systems, so aggregating enough inventory to attract users is a problem.

HGTV, being national, shouldn’t have that problem.

But the regional model is a good idea just waiting for the right time.

Steve Yelvington on social networks:

I bring this up because I believe a decline in local community connections is one of the major factors undermining local newspapers in the United States. We’re all spending too much time watching reality television and not enough time dealing with the reality in our own backyards.

One thing Bluffton Today can do to help in this regard, if they’re not already doing it, is bring the online social networks into the real world — host regular events for contributors … go to the theater or dinner together, host symposiums, tour gardens and museums, etc. We tried this with East County Online, but of course we had a much smaller audience to work with back then — still, our events were reasonably well attended.

Not long ago, I set up a Google Analytics account for RVClub.com. Google Analytics is a pretty darn cool tool for something that is free (well, you do need to have an AdWords account — but that hasn’t cost me much money yet because hardly anyone ever clicks on my ads! I should hasten to add, once I relaunch RVC’s new design, I’ll pay more attention to AdWords and try to improve the ads’ performance.)

I’ve used a bunch of log analyzers and measurement tools before, including Sage and Omniture (two of the bigger names in web analytics). I hated Sage but found much that was good and useful in Omniture. Comparing Google Analytics with Omniture, which is better? Well, much would depend on your needs and your expertise with each application — I’ve gotten to know Omniture pretty well, Google Analytics not so much yet. I could do a lot of stuff with Omniture that I haven’t figured out how to do with Analytics yet. But I can get better information out of Analytics than I could out of something like Webtrends or even Sage.

And, again, Analytics is free.

For a free metrics tool, it’s pretty darn robust.

I think I’ll get even more out of it with the redesigned RVClub site since I’ve improved the structure of the site and am using Title tags better.

Here’s another tool that will help me get the most out of Google Analytics — the Google Analytics blog.

Bottom line, btw, if you can’t afford Omniture or one of the other Javascript-based analytics tools, request a Google Analytics account. It would be even more robust when paired with a log-based tool (something I’ll have when I move RVClub.com to its new server).

Local and site search has been some what of a pet subject of mine for some time, and I’ve talked to a few people in the industry about it. Yet, this is the first time I’ve heard the phrase “federated search.”

“We’re starting to hear the term ‘federated search’ pop up from different newspapers, without any prompting,” says Kelly (Catherine Kelly, President of HarvestInfo), who was recently promoted from CTO. “They say ‘we have six search boxes’” and want to clean it up. Kelly says the papers also want to stop isolating their shopping content from classifieds and display.

I’m not really out to pick a bone with Harvest, because they’re a good vendor, with good support and good products, but I have to wonder if Kelly isn’t inventing the term “federated search” to differentiate Harvest’s product from market leader Planet Discover? PD talks about “integrated search,” which I find a useful and more descriptive term, and the term I’ve heard most often from my colleagues.

It’s really all semantics, except when you have duplicate jargon, communication can get more confusing.

Adding integrated search to a newspaper Web site is one of the most important things a site manager can do for his or her business.

And to comment on something else attributed to Kelly in the quote above: that newspapers want to “stop isolating their shopping content from classifieds and display,” if that means creating “shopping sites” that integrate classified and display, I’m not sure that’s a good move. When thinking about ads, you need to consider people’s intentions and expectations. Shoppers looking for a used sofa aren’t interested in seeing ads for new furniture (and the opposite is true, too), and your advertisers don’t necessarily want to see their wares displayed next to some guy’s used junk (as they’d see it).

So, classifieds and shopping should have some separation, but that doesn’t mean some sort of contextual link isn’t appropriate.

If you’re a newspaper Web site manager, how is your traffic?

If at the end of the month, you tally up your unique visitors and page views and pat yourself on the back because you’re getting more traffic than any local competitor, you’re not really setting the bar high enough.

Have you ever tried to figure out what percentage of your DMA adult users visit your Web site on a daily basis?

To me, the most important metric for newspaper Web sites is local daily reach — how many people in your DMA visit your site each day.

I don’t have enough data yet to say what your goal should be, but I’m thinking two percent isn’t good enough.

There have been reports (sorry, I don’t have access to those reports right now) that put the percentage of adults on the Internet who visited a local news site on a typical day at eight or nine percent.

That means if your DMA population is 1 million, and 60 percent of the adults have a net connection, then on a daily basis 54,000 people in your local market are looking at local news.

I bet your local daily unique users are no where near nine percent of the DMA/access population.

Some factors to consider:

• Some of your local competitors are getting a piece of that market share.
• Survey respondents who say they are accessing local news may be looking at news for an old home town, not necessarily your town.
• Survey respondents may be defining local news differently than we think, or over report their interest in local news.
• People living in areas were major metros (such as WashingtonPost.com and SignOnSanDiego.com) have done a great job of increasing audience share may skew the national numbers.
• You are also competing against the news portals for some of the local news audience.

So let’s stipulate that 9 percent is an unrealistic target. How about 6 percent? That would mean your daily unique visitors in our imaginary 1 million pop DMA would be 36,000.

I can’t define your target for you, since there are a number of variables for each market, but here’s my suggestion:

• Get the latest total DMA adult pop number.
• Find the latest estimate of percentage with net access.
• Now look at your average daily unique visitors.
• Now you need to know what percentage of your site users live in your market. One way to calculate this is the percentage of registered users in your DMA, then compare this to metrics like percentage of visitors from your time zone. The best you can do here is guess at the percentage of daily visitors are local (unless you happen to use something like Tacoda or Omniture with registration data imported).
• Of your daily unique visitors, how many do you estimate are local?
• Divide that number by total DMA adults with net access — that is your daily local reach percentage.
• Now set your goal 2 percent higher — that should be the target you will do everything you can to reach within the next 8 to 12 months.

If you’re a site manager, let me know how you measure up. I would like to aggregate some data for comparison sake and to help set a reasonable measure of audience growth progress.

Yesterday, I bought a MacBook. One of the cool features is the magnetic power chord connection. The biggest problem I had with my HP lap top was the AC jack eventually breaking.

However, it looks like I need to remember to leave my MacBook unplugged when I step away from the machine. Otherwise, it might catch fire.

From Om Malik, I learn that PhotoBucket is the the #1 photo sharing site on the Web.

Why is it popular — Om says, cause it’s simple and easy.

Simple and easy is a great strategy. It’s worked for Google. It’s worked for iPod. It’s worked for TiVo (sort of). It’s what I aim for in site design. I’m not always sure it’s achieved, especially with large, complex sites..

I just signed up for a PhotoBucket account. The registration was interesting. The first screen is just user name and password, they they want to know your name, sex, birth date and location. Then they take you through three paid screens — an opportunity to sign up for sponsored e-mail messages. And then they induce the last bit of personal data from you: Your physical address, if you want to enter a photo contest (of course, I did).

PhotoBucket claims 18 million users. If that’s true, the registration system is likely a good deal for the advertisers — it’s worth noting that two of the advertisers where college programs with campuses in Bakersfield, so the ads I saw were pretty well targeted.

I uploaded what I think are some of my best photos. Here’s a slideshow.

Here is a must read article by David Greiner for everyone involved in designing, creating or specifying e-mail newsletters and e-mail marketing campaign.

Key points:

• Make sure your HTML e-mail looks good and is readable to peaple with images turned off
• Test in a variety of e-mail clients
• CSS is OK, but use with caution, and don’t use for position — and be sure to embed your CSS

There’s no point in sending out HTML e-mail if you’re not going to do it right. As they say, read the whole thing

I watched Mexico lose to Argentina today in World Cup soccer. We were pulling for Mexico, of course.

Via Steve Smith, I found this link from a previous Argentina match. You can be a complete idiot about soccer, like me, and appreciate the beauty of this goal.

I have a new computer.

It’s a MacBook.

My old (and by old, I mean less than three years) HP has always been fragile. It served me well, but was prone to hardware problems. Recently, applications were crashing consistently. I’d had two physical memory dumps recently. I suspect a hardware problem.

No matter what may come, I’ve got to have a reliable laptop.

I chose the Mac in part because I used to be an exclusively Mac user, in part because OS X seems so cool, but the real kicker is the duel processor. I can’t get away from some key windows applications for things like Cold Fusion development.

I do need to find some good open source software for the Mac side — I’m not going to buy Office, and I could use something for HTML, etc. Maybe I’ll go back to BBEdit.

So far, I’m pretty darn happy with this machine. I just need to readjust to the lack of a right mouse button.