If you like art and live near Tacoma, you've probably visited the web sites for MOG and TAM. But have you checked out ArtRod.org?

An organic feeling pervades the web site and, you would assume, the art you might find at one of their exhibits. The "look and feel" of a web site should mirror the atmosphere its publisher projects in reality.

But what I really like about the site is that it still has all the information you would want about the organization, events and exhibits. Too often an art site will try really hard to not look corporate and go so far as to be obscure. Frustrating visitors who are looking for information is bad practice no matter what type of web site you're publishing.

The ArtRod site is obviously done on a budget, but done pretty well, incorporating Web 2.0 technologies by linking to a blog page on LiveJournal, a MySpace page, a tag page on Del.ic.ious and a photo gallery page on Flickr.

In web publishing these days, you don't have to reinvent the wheel to do cool stuff. Something ArtRod obviously has figured out.

Our real estate blogger, Barbara Clements, is featured in a story from Boston's public radio station, WBUR. Her coverage of Zillow.com, the web site that allows you to see updated valuation for any neighborhood, has made her an expert in the field.

Check out Barb's blog and listen to the interview.

I spent a couple hours Tuesday talking to a journalism class at PLU and am going to meet with students at UW-T today to discuss the school’s newspaper. In doing some due diligence, I was checking out the paper’s web site and it made me wonder what “the competition” looked like.

Because of the logistics, you shouldn’t expect anything too special from college newspaper web sites. The printed college newspaper is a labor of love that barely gets done each week on campuses across the country. And at smaller schools, it’s even tougher. So the web site only appears a flicker on the fringes of these students’ time.

Still, the news is there, so if you want to keep tabs on one of the community’s campuses, click away.

UPS’s The Trail: A simple if somewhat crude design, but it does have some nice features, like a poll for voting. All summaries are clickable, meaning all text on the index pages are actually links. That’s a bit weird, but it looks like this site is update completely by hand so just having the content online is a victory.

PLU’s The Mast: Decent site architecture, but the site is topped by a university-wide frame, which is unfortunate, but likely out of the hands of the students. The homepage art is a bit muddled as the banner is duplicated. There are links to PDF versions of paper if you’re into that. It’s easy to find contact information for staff, which is nice. It looks like this is a homegrown system, making it all the more impressive.

UW-T Ledger: This site is produced on a national software platform from a company called College Publisher. As such, the students have no control over the design of the site. You also have to register for the site which is frustrating (I know, our site has registration, too, but it’s still frustrating).

This third-party platform does have some cool tools, though. Each article has a “tools” box complete with email and print fuctions and also a way to quickly link the story to four cool Web 2.0 sites: Blogger, Digg, Del.ic.ious and Newsvine.

That’s an idea I might “borrow” for our site.

The Seattlest has discovered our Mike Sando and classified him accurately: Seahawks Monster.

This man covers the Seahawks like Cookie Monster eats cookies. Sando's got Seahawks crumbs flying out of his mouth, cascading down his front ...

I haven't made Seattlest part of my daily blog diet (yet) but it has quite a buzz among some of my co-workers. His take on Sando's blog is spot-on. The guy is doing amazing things.

I posted a note on our web site a couple weeks ago asking readers to send me links to local blogs (the offer still stands, by the way). Here's a sampling of the submissions I recieved:

Erik Emery Hanberg
Erik authors a “classic” blog. I say that because it’s not a narrow, specific topic that he focuses on; rather, it’s a meandering sampler of his personal life and insights touching on everything from golf to fantasy baseball to movies to newspaper editorials.

The Cassandra Frost Collection
Sandy Frost of Spanaway is planning to write a book and is using this blog to chart the course. It features lengthy, not-too-frequent posts that are mostly personal and observational and is written in a casual, conversational style that is easy to read.

GossipMomma
A local Tacoma resident, the GossipMomma posts abundant celeb photos and various tidbits from other sources. It’s updated often and features plenty of eye candy – if you’re into that sort of thing. ;)

If you know of any other local blogs or cool web sites, send me a note.

Often, the most popular stories on our site are either sports-related or crime-related. Words like "prostitute," "drugs" or "brutal" seem to draw clicks no matter what the stories are about. Our headlines are written for the newspaper (by an award-winning staff, to boot) and sometimes work very well online. But other times, a story is so complex it's virtually impossible to boil it down in 4-5 words.

Case in point: Saturday's story about a teenage girl and Fircrest man embroiled in a criminal investigation and upcoming trial. It's a gripping read, but the headline didn't do it justice on the web site: "She said, he said and then mom said."

In the newspaper, a subhead assists the reader in learning a little more about the story and conveying the intrigue of this twisted tail. But our online readers still found it enough to make it the No. 3 story over the weekend on the site.

We're asking readers to take their digital cameras to the Daffodil parade this weekend and send us their best shots. The goal is to empower readers to help us cover a popular event with more eyes (and lenses) than we can muster with our staff.

We have three photographers assigned to the four parades, but thousands of people will attend the event and if just a few of them send us some pictures, our photo report will be that much more complete.

Before the web, this wasn't in the best interest of newspapers because the limited space and high cost of newsprint. With digital space so cheap, it makes sense to let readers play, too.

This movement is happening all over the world under various names, including "citizen journalism."

To post your parade photos, or any other photos you'd like to share, visit our community publishing section.

Good news: Mike Sando's Seahawks Insider blog has been nominated as a finalist for an Eppy Award, a national honor sponsored by Editor and Publisher magazine.

He'll be up against sports blogs from the Boston Globe and Houston Chronicle. The winner will be announced next month.

I've taken a little break in my blogging, dealing with a different kind of break at home. My five-year-old son broke his leg on Easter, jumping off a playground piece that was a little too high off the ground. He's got a cast and wheelchair now and is adapting to his new sedintery life, which features a steady diet of Legos and video games.

One cool game site we've found is called Miniclip.com. The Monster truck game is his favorite. But he also enjoys the games at Lego.com and Tonka.com. The Lego site features a program you can download and create your own model, then upload it back to them and they'll create the pieces for your spec. We haven't tried it yet, but it sounds cool.

A few weeks ago, while discussing the local blogging scene, I publicly regretted that my favorite local blogger had moved to Kent. Apparently I should have looked at the posting date on that particular entry. Blogger Derek Young was kind enough to email me with an explanation:

It was part of an April Fools joke on my friends and family. Generally speaking, the readers of my site got it. My business partners, parents, and siblings all thought I had moved. I just found out yesterday how angry my mom was that she wasn't informed of our decision to change homes.

Er, welcome back. Glad you decided to stay.

The finalists for the 2006 Webbys were announced this week. Although no local web sites were nominated for the "online Oscar," there is always some very cool stuff worth checking out.

Some regional players were mentioned, like Microsoft for its Xbox site.

A Seattle agency, DDB, was nominated for "Best Visual Design - Aesthetic" for a site called Remembering Segregation http://www.remembersegregation.org/

CareerBuilder was nominated in Best Employment, which is worth noting because McClatchy Co., the TNT's owner, may receive one-third ownership of this site as result of its recent purchase of Knight Ridder. So our SouthSoundJobs site could become part of the Career Builder network in the not-too-distant future, which would be an improvement for local job seekers.

We like our robots. But sometimes they’re not so smart.

A newspaper web site relies on a tremendous amount of automation. While it takes dozens of people in editing, pagination and production to create the newspaper each day, the web site gets by with three or four people making mostly minor changes and additions to the content each day.

Yes, automation is cost-effective, but it sometimes makes for, well, awkward situations. Like yesterday, when the most popular story on the site, "Students plot to start fire, kill teachers" is paired with an advertisement for a funeral home that read “Some decisions should be made before you need to make them.”

We received an email from a reader asking how anyone could put that ad on that story without realizing how tasteless it looked. The answer: no one actually did. Our ads cycle through different sections of the site as their scheduled and computer programs make sure they appear the right amount in the right places. So this was a case of random juxtaposition. (I sent her note to this effect; she replied to say she had since noticed how the ads were rotating through other parts of the site.)

Obviously, if the association between ad and story were too far over the line of good taste, we’d interrupt our automation to remove it. A few years ago, at my last newspaper job, we had an ad running for commemorative baseball bats that appeared on a story about murder where the weapon involved was - you guessed it - a baseball bat.

Stupid robots.

Some people who have lived here longer than me (I moved here two years ago, but my wife grew up here) might remember an obscure cable show called Spud Goodman. Spud's making short movies for the internet now and, judging by his latest effort, has found his niche.

The Tacoma Diaries series features several clips, with titles like A Man and His Gun and Crisis? What Crisis? I'll confess I haven't seen them all yet, but I laughed out loud at the latest installment, called Potty Mouth.

Don't be surprised to see a story in The News Tribune in the near future on the series. Local people using a new medium to creatively editorialize on local happenings: This is good stuff.

As part of my job here at the TNT, I send out emails to the newsroom with updates about our online initiatives. Here are a couple of tidbits from this week's update:

The Junior Daffodil Parade gallery was a big hit with almost 5,000 page views over the weekend, which is pretty good for our slow days online (Most of our traffic comes during the workweek). Kudos to photographer Russ Carmack and online producer Jeff Hendrickson for putting that together.

10 most popular stories so far in April (with author):

1. Sonics announce they're for sale (Hughes and Cockerham)
2. Hill-Parker feud a thing of the past (Hughes)
3. Kacyvenski takes pay cut in win-win move (Sando)
4. How did Adre-Anna die? (Lynn/Mulick)
5. Half a world away Fisher hears it from Steelers fans (McGrath)
6. I-5 bridges to close as traffic gets reroute (Corvin)
7. Hawks receiver has happy homecoming (Sando)
8. Remains identified as Adre-Anna's (Mulick/Lynn)
9. Burleson heads home to Seattle (Sando)
10. A Pierce County showdown (Cockerham)

I'm always on the lookout for web sites that display information graphically because I'm a firm believer that you make data more accessible and, therefore, reach more people if it can be displayed visually. Here then, in a temporary departure from our intensely local focus, are a few of my favorites:

Ten by Ten: Current news presented by thumbnail images with cool rollovers.

Baby Name Wizard: The most popular baby names of the past and present in an interactive graph.

Amaztype: Entertaining (if not quite useful) display of Amazon.com search results.

Here’s an interesting – and local – example of the difference between Web. 1.0 and Web 2.0. In case you’re new to the blog, Web 2.0 is a buzzword applied to new internet tools that make it so easy for people to create content that sites are more dynamic. Wikipedia is a great example of web 2.0, where the users have created all the content. You can see it in action on our web site by clicking on the “comments” link on any news story.

So if you’re looking to read and share in the Junior Daffodil Parade that took place on Saturday, here are your options:

Web 1.0: the “official site” of the parade has all the pertinent information you would have needed to attend the parade, including a map. But it has not been updated with photos since the parade ran on Saturday and look every bit the “1999” that is stamped on the bottom of the page. I don’t mean to disparage the effort – which is probably all volunteer – but it is a great example of how the web used to work.

Web 2.0: a local blogger named Kevin Freitas hit the parade on Saturday and chronicled the event with a decidedly first-person perspective. Sure, you might not be interested in Kevin’s lunch, or that his parents were in town, but he also posted a couple dozen images to his blog to give you a sense of what the parade was like (in a word: soggy).

This information is not only presented in a web 2.0 manner, it wouldn’t even have existed in the web 1.0 world. The tools for content creation have lowered the bar for entry so much that anyone can post content fairly easily (Full disclosure: Kevin is a web programmer who did some contract work for us last year, but these tools are really easy to use. Really.)

Meanwhile, on our site, you can view the photos from our staff and read the news story, which are Web 1.0 efforts. But you can also comment on the news story and submit your own photos for inclusion in our reader photo gallery – some of which will also be published in the newspaper.

Three weeks ago, we entered the podcasting age here at thenewstribune.com. Thankfully, a new trend in online content has yet to emerge and render podcasts hopelessly irrelevant.

Maybe next week.

Our third podcast features Howard Clifford, the last man off the first Narrows bridge before it collapsed in 1940. He's 94 now and was frustrated a few times during our 20-minute session because he forgot a few things, but he came across as a sharp, wonderful man and was a real pleasure to meet.

Also, here's a great overview of podcasting, including what they are and how to produce them yourselves.

Update on an earlier post about Newsvine.com: the site has 200 local versions available in beta testing, including one for Seattle-Tacoma. Add this to an already crowded field of local news aggregator sites from Yahoo, Google, Topix and others and you realize there are several business models – or portions thereof – based solely on other people’s content.

For these local Seattle-Tacoma news sites to succeed, they must use compelling news stories from our site, the Seattle newspapers and TV stations and the AP wire. The headlines appear on their sites but the links eventually go to ours, so we should be happy about the added traffic, right?

For a site like Newsvine to succeed, it also needs readers to “seed” stories (submit them for inclusion), rank them and comment on them. It’s a great model of interactivity. My guess is it will work well on a national level where the proportions of scale will be helpful. Locally, it will probably be hit-or-miss with lots of activity on some of the 200 sites while others remain fairly quiet.

The courts, methinks, will eventually settle the issue of how much content aggregator sites can feature – and build a business around. Personally, I get a lot of news by scanning headlines on aggregator sites (among others) while never actually clicking the links. That means I can get a headline and some small dose of news from a site without ever visiting it or seeing the advertising which, in a perfect world, would be paying the freight for creating the news content.

Google prevailed in round one of this future court battle. There will be more in the years to come.

There is a constant conversation within our company about the future of our industry (which is a good thing) and I'm taken with how that conversation is spilling out into the community.

On a couple of recent forays outside the building I've been asked questions that I thought would normally be reserved for industry blogs and corporate board meetings, like "is Craislist killing newspapers?"

That one came from a recent tour by the newspaper editors of Western State Hospital. It's a question that is debated daily in the blogosphere and I was surprised and impressed to know that doctors and administrators at the state's largest mental health institution were also curious about the future of news.

You might have read about a recent business deal where the owner of The News Tribune, McClatchy Co., agreed to purchase the second-largest newspaper company in the U.S., Knight Ridder. One of the strengths of this deal, in my opinion, is the online potential of a larger network of newspaper than McClatchy currently has in its stable. Our company VP Chris Hendricks recently sat down with Marketwatch.com to discuss the future and it looks like a good deal for consumers: one site that has everything local they could be looking for, including news, classifieds, advertising, movie times, maps, and web sites.

The headline on the column describes it as a “mini-Google strategy.” And at this point, it is very “mini.” Google has 4,000 computer programmers; all the McClatchy papers combined have a couple dozen.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t trump their technology with our content. It’s been the strength of the local newspaper franchise for generations and will continue to be the cornerstone of our success. If we don’t adapt enough new technology, however, consumers will forgo content for convenience and leave us out of the equation.

My favorite local blog is called Exit 133. Unfortunately the author recently moved to Kent meaning the one blog that I’ve found that does a nice job mixing news, speculation and gossip with personal insight based locally could soon be gone.


I’ve been trying to find more local blogs with a couple of online tools: FeedMap and Blogdigger. So far, I haven’t turned up much. We have links to a few local blogs on our blog index page but are looking for more. Do you know of a good local blog? And by local, I mean something of interest to the South Sound. Send me a note.

Do you want to start writing a blog of your own? If so, check out our community publishing area. If you’re a registered user of the site you can start blogging right away.