In an earlier post about our identity theft series/experiment, I wondered what success would look like. I think I know now.

The web, of course, has a reputation for only attracting readers with short attention spans who want “quick hits.” With this series, A Case of Identity, we were able to dispel that myth (at least in part). The first chapter of the series will finish the month of February as the most popular story on our site. The total traffic for the series would rank it in the top 20 sections on the site, in the same neighborhood as our coverage of crime, Mariners baseball and Sonics basketball.

The feedback was enthusiastic, too, including one disappointed email at 4:17 a.m. when the next chapter wasn’t yet available. Readers appreciated the conversational, blog-style form of the series and asked why more of our news coverage couldn’t be done this way.

The story has a happy ending, too. After the alleged identity thief was (finally) thrown out of his apartment when his cover is blown, he disappeared under the cloud of potential criminal charges. He ended up working at a Bed, Bath and Beyond in Lynnwood where he stirred up suspicion about his character. So his boss googled his name and found our series online. The police were notified of his whereabouts and, yesterday, he was arrested on suspicion of identity theft.

The bottom line: this was a fantastic experiment in nontraditional, long-form journalism produced exclusively for an online audience. Hopefully it will lead to more such experiments at the TNT in the near future.

Apparently the U-dub thinks you should. As part of a series called Communication 2.0 Technology Workshops, you could attend a session on March 24 called “I Blog, Therefore I Am.”

Cost for the five-hour session is $100 for general public ($75 for UWAA and AWC members).

In case you missed it in The Nose today, DOT has a fun animation of what someone thinks it will look like when the toll booths are in action on the new bridge. As usual, The Nose has the angle:

Friendly toll attendants are promised. A vast expanse of grass, greener than the Irish countryside, flanks the highway. Blaring horns, roadkill and middle digits are nowhere in this Pleasantville tableau.

Also missing are the westbound lanes of traffic – perhaps a victim of Narrows Bridge cost overruns. Force majeure, you know.

The Business Examiner has been publishing an email newsletter since 2001, ostensibly to fill in between its biweekly print publication. It’s a worthy addition to your email diet if you’re interested in local business news, and this week, launched a new segment called Blog Watch.

Each Wednesday, the BE Daily will include a roundup of business-related news or tidbits found in local blogs. I see this as further confirmation of the emergence of local blogs as viable sources for news and information.

I asked Steve Dunkelberger, the editor the Business Examiner, to give us the lowdown on the BE Daily, which goes out to more than 2,700 email addresses each business day afternoon.

"The BE emails are meant to deliver breaking business news, local industry stories, business reader profiles and maybe just a little fun and interaction along the way through things like our Fishbowls, Coffee Breaks and such," he wrote via email.

Dunkelberger then went on to summarize the company’s digital efforts thusly: “We are not a newspaper. We are an information resource that uses print, video, email, presentations, forums and whatever other delivery method fits the message.”

Amen, brother.

If, like me, you have children and live in the South Sound, there’s the constant need for things to do and places to go. Sure, there are plenty of local options, but you can never have too many.

Thankfully, local blogger Jennifer Boutell has taken up the challenge of providing ongoing suggestions for parents on the go. Tacomamama.com just launched and already has uncovered a couple of diamonds in the rough (like the new Lego setup at Freighthouse Square).

Boutell sent me an email recently alerting me to the blog (which I always appreciate) so I returned the serve with a few questions.

1. Why did you decide to start the blog?

I originally started "361 Good Days in Tacoma" in response to all of the negative publicity after the Foss school shooting. (It started the day after, (Jan 4) which is why it is 361 instead of 365 days.) . . . Then, I realized that there was a need for a website about children's activities in Tacoma, and Tacomamama was born. I also realized that all of this information I was blogging every day could actually be useful to other people, if I indexed it and put it up on its own site somewhere.

=> Read more!

Because you can never have too much of a good thing, we launched several new blogs recently. I know what you're thinking: All the world needs is another blog, especially one from a news organization. But give us a chance -- I think these new blogs will find their own slice of audience.

Mariners Insider: Sportswriter Larry LaRue is covering the Seattle Mariners for the 20th season, so you better believe he has the inside scoop. He's also a prolific photographer so his blog won't just be a bunch of baseball statistics.

Open House: OK, this is a re-launch of a blog that went dark for a few months while we were between real estate reporters. Devona Wells has taken over and we're hoping she'll build an even more robust community.

The Inside Lane: Sportswriter Mindi Rice is going to tap into the popularity of motorsports in our area, dishing on NASCAR, Kasey Kahne, and the local track action.

In Your Neighborhood: This one's for you. Dozens of readers of the newspaper (and web site) have signed up to contribute observations and opinions about items of local interest.

We've had suggestions that a business blog about economic development should be our next addition. What do you think?

One my favorite features on the homepage of thenewstribune.com is the list of the top 5 most popular stories. It quickly tells the audience which of our news stories is drawing the most interest.

Occasionally, an older story will get linked by a high-traffic web site that sends hundreds, sometimes thousands, of new readers to our site. It happened again today when Yahoo News linked to our coverage of the Foss school shooting as a related link to its coverage of a bomb plot uncovered in Connecticut.

Then, once a story gets in the top 5, more readers click on it, creating a sort of vicious circle. That's a bit of what's happening today as about one-third of the page views are coming from thenewstribune.com, the other two-thirds are coming from Yahoo.

So remember, when you're looking at the top 5 stories on our site or other sites, those are the most popular stories from all Internet traffic. Not just traffic from the web site you're visiting.

The Seattle Times has a story today about Seattle Weekly founder David Brewster's plans to launch a Web "newspaper" covering Washington, Oregon, Idaho and British Columbia.

The publication will be called Crosscut.

The story says Brewster may model Crosscut after NewWest.net, a citizen journalism initiative that I've long felt is the best startup news operation going (in the U.S.).

As a "news guy," I'm all for more sources. As an employee of a news company that could see this as competition, I say "welcome." A regionally focused news operation won't likely change how we're doing things in Tacoma. If anything, it will make us focus more attention and energy to serving our Web audience. Always a good thing in my book.

If you are into birding, you probably already know about the Seattle Audubon Society’s attractive site called BirdNote. It offers links to education and local chapters of the Audubon Society. It also archives - and delivers via podcast - the audio clips from regular segments on local radio stations produced by the organization.

Today’s installment on KPLU described an effort this weekend (Feb. 16-19): the annual Great Backyard Bird Count. It’s a national program sponsored by Cornell University. What’s cool this year is that participants can go online to the BirdNote web site to enter the birds they identify. No registration needed.

Hopefully, the site will display the results online once they’re available. Until then, you can shop the BirdNote store for clothing, books feeders and accessories.

A number of downtown areas and business districts are publishing web sites to provide information about their particular offerings. It’s a good idea, of course, but in browsing a handful of local sites, it looks like more of an afterthought than a priority. Most sites have updated event information, which is good, but I have to wonder how long it’s been since the last redesign for many of them. When you’re trying to promote a “thriving, lively business district,” having a contemporary, modern look and feel would seem to help.

That said, I’m guessing Olympia recently launched a new look, because its site looks really nice. (Portland's is cool, too.)

Aesthetics aside, there is a lot of good information on these pages, so if you’re wondering what’s going on in your neighborhood, give them a look.

Downtown web sites:
• Puyallup
• Sumner
• Gig Harbor
• Tacoma
• Olympia
• Proctor

Many people have written the obituary for newspapers before, but when I saw this blog post yesterday featuring some provocative quotes from the publisher of the New York Times, it certainly raised an eyebrow. To wit:

"I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either."

I’m not going to pretend to be smarter than the publisher of “the most important newspaper in the world,” but I'm pretty sure you'll still be able to get a printed New York Times in 2012. And a printed News Tribune, for that matter. I’m guessing he made these comments to provoke discussion more than to predict the future. (If you want predictions on the future of news, read this.)

What do you think? Would you be OK with getting all your news without a printed newspaper?

Investigative reporter Sean Robinson begins a five-day series on our web site today, chronicling the case of stolen identity that afflicted a friend. He was determined to write it in a magazine style, which meant it was too long to publish in print. So we're publishing it online in its entirety and will run an abbreviated version on Friday in the paper.

It's an experiment for us to see if our audience will read long-form journalism online. I'm not sure if it will work or not - or what we kind of traffic we would consider a "success" - but I'm glad we're trying some new ways to tell stories using the Web site.

Any thoughts? Are you inclined to follow a lengthy, magazine-style piece online if the subject matter interests you? Drop me a line and let me know or post a comment.

Not surprisingly, the biggest news story of the month dominated the viewership of thenewstribune.com in January. The shooting at Foss High School that left one student dead was the focus of four of the 10 entries on the month's list.

Interestingly, we had two new forms of content crack the top 10: our first video segment and the first reader-submitted photo gallery.

So here's the list for January 2007:

1. Student dies in shooting at Foss High School; suspect captured
2. Photo Gallery - Shooting at Foss High School
3. Winter wonderland (Reader-submitted photos)
4. Death stuns school
5. Police files: Car chase, jets, theft, 9-year-old
6. TACOMA: Man parks brand-new Pontiac on Narrows Bridge, jumps off
7. Video - Foss High School shooting reaction
8. Get set for another I-5 mess
9. Bob’s Java Jive forced to close
10. Family reels from awful news

Tacoma released a citizen survey on its web site this week, allowing residents to read the full report (173 pages) in a PDF download or view the PowerPoint presentation (28 slides).

Reports like these are interesting to browse, but I don’t have the time or energy to go through the whole thing and decide what it means. Look for TNT reporter Kris Sherman to make sense of it in tomorrow’s news.

Scanning the executive summary, though, I found the following to be noteworthy, if a little depressing:

Just over half of Tacoma residents responding to the survey reported that their overall quality of life in the city was “good” or better.

Most ratings for general community characteristics were below the norm when compared to jurisdictions across the nation and of similar size,

Most of the community characteristics ratings pertaining to accessibility and ease of travel in the city were lower than ratings given by respondents in jurisdictions across the nation, except for ease of bus travel in Tacoma and ease of rail travel in Tacoma, which were above the norm.

Asked to rate the speed of population, retail and job growth in the city over the past two years, a majority of respondents said that population growth in the city is “too fast,” while an even stronger majority said that job growth in Tacoma is “too slow.”

About 95% of all respondents felt that crime and drugs were at least “moderate” problems in the city, with about three-quarters reporting that drugs were a “major” problem.

I checked a number of the local blogs to see if there was conversation about the report or the findings, but I didn’t find any yet (and Technorati told me no one was linking to the reports, either). Maybe the news story tomorrow will get things started.

UPDATE: The story was held from Friday's paper to make room for other news but is scheduled to be on the front page of Saturday's edition.