Congratulations to Mike Sando, whose Seahawks Insider blog has been named a finalist in the category of Best Media-Affiliated Sports Blog by Editor and Publisher Magazine (see the full list of Eppy nominees). This is big honor, since the competition is open to everyone (Sports Illustrated, ESPN, USA Today, New York Times, etc.).

Sando won the award last year and, like a true trailblazer, has added several innovations for the judges to consider during the past 12 months. Among them:

-- With the help web producer Jeff Hendrickson, there is now a podcast player with all the audio interviews that Sando records.
-- Detailed and artful spreadsheets, a product of Sando's mastery of Microsoft Excel, a program he knew little about a couple years ago. Now, he's a self-taught expert.
-- A regular "Answers to your questions" audio segment. How regular? Sando's done 164 of them since the beginning of the 2006 football season.

So how popular is Sando's blog? Last month, it accounted for about 10% of the overall page views on thenewstribune.com, classified pages included.

Keep up the good work, Mike.

You don't want to pack a lunch or eat at home on Thursday.

Really.

Here's why.

I was at a family function Saturday, chatting with my wife's 76-year-old uncle. He gushed about all the blogs we have at thenewstribune.com, which kind of surprised me since I had always assumed the demographic for our blogs was the younger, highly technical, non-newspaper reader.

Well, Uncle Jerry doesn't fit in any of those categories. But he's spending about an hour every morning reading our blogs. Turns out, it's the perfect way to pass the time until his newspaper is delivered to his home.

Congratulations to the Tacoma-Pierce County Sports Commission for its recent web award. The site, TacomaSports.org, was recognized with the 2007 Outstanding Website Award for a Sports Commission under a $200,000 Budget last Thursday at an annual symposium in Dallas. (See the full press release.)

TPCSC Executive Director Tim Waer was on-hand to receive the award, and has good reason to feel honored since the site was developed in-house. (Go here for my previous mention of the site.)

In an era of outsourcing everything, it’s refreshing to see an organization to the steps to adapt to the evolving digital opportunities. It’s a good lesson for others.

Paul Ellis emailed yesterday to announce the launch of another local blog: Tacoma Tech Connect.

The blog is a collaborative effort by Chamber staff member Gary Brackett and Ellis along with UWT’s Andrew Fry.

Some feel there isn't a thriving technology community here in the South Sound. Hopefully this blog, and the continuing efforts those behind it, will work to dispel that myth over time.

If you work in online anything, you're always looking for more ways to drive traffic to your site and increase readership. (Gotta sell some ads to pay the bills, ya know.) Next week I'm heading down to Portland for a couple days to hopefully learn some new tricks at a conference that looks like an amazing value.

The InnoTech Conference general session costs $35 and the eMarketing track I'm looking forward to costs $59 for one day or $109 for both days. Compare this with most conferences that cost anywhere from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars and it looks pretty good.

If you're going to InnoTech, or know other good conference opportunities around the region, drop me a line.

The most famous "Craig" in the online world recorded some thoughts for NPR's wonderful series called "This I Believe" yesterday. He talked about how most of the people who use his free classifieds site - which he considers one big community - "are overwhelmingly trustworthy and deeply OK." He mentions the Golden Rule serving online communities, which is a message I'd like to hand-deliver to those who pollute reader comment areas like ours, or the comments section of our blogs.

The quality of conversation would be raised a level or two on some days if everyone treated others as they want to be treated. Unless that's the problem, of course, that the trolls and "way-too-opinionated" users are looking for what they're dishing out. In that case, I don't think we can help them.

Here's what Craig believes. Not sure if our local Craigslist mishap changes his mind, but those folks surely need a Golden Rule refresher.

Dan Voelpel checked out the Rainier Communication Commission's wifi pilot project in Steilacoom this week for today's column. His take? You can already get DSL-like speed from the one-mile cloud provided by CenturyTel.

I haven't tested it myself, but I already know I'll agree with Dan's one little nit:

The only disappointment I could find during two days of testing? I couldn’t pick up a CenturyTel signal at the Steilacoom Deli & Pub. You’ll have to do something about that, Mayor Lucas.

Read the full column here. And if you like your free wifi indoors, don't forget our Free Wifi Map.

Justin Carleton has entered the local blogosphere with a blog focusing on our Tacoma Nine, the Rainiers.

Carleton sent me a note about the blog earlier this week, and I replied with some questions about the new blog. Our virtual interview went something like this:

Q: Why is the blog called No Rhubarb?

Carleton: I'm not a fan of Rhubarb, the giant plush Reindeer (or demon goat-creature, as I call it on the blog) mascot of the Rainiers. I think Rhubarb is creepy, and an on-going bit on the blog will be other, creepier minor-league mascots. The newest one is going up today; the Spokane Indians "Spokaneasaurus". Good old-fashioned nightmare fuel.

Q: Why did you start the blog?

Carleton: I started the blog for several reasons. The first is the easy part: I'm a huge baseball fan and a bit of a loudmouth. That seems to be all you need sometimes.

I'd actually began blogging several years ago on what is now more of a group blog. That blog had lost my interest recently, and I was looking to do something new. My wife and I are relative newcomers to Tacoma, and she's been very "local" lately. We've been making an attempt to really enjoy our city, and she's concentrated on local issues more and more on her blog, bothhands.mu.nu. A blog about our baseball team seemed natural, and – I don't want to say it was needed – but as a Triple-A team just miles away from an intensely popular major league team, the Rainiers do seem somewhat ignored at times.

Q: What do you hope to get out of it?

Carleton: Adulation of the masses.

Actually, I blog because I enjoy it. I like the writing, love the research for stuff like the Rainiers 101 series I'm working on, and I like following the team closer than I usually would. I think, down the line, that I'd like the blog to be a place where Rainiers fans can congregate.

Plus, free tickets or a press pass would be cool.

Q: What experience do you have with blogging or minor league baseball?

Carleton: Well, as I said before, I've been blogging for some time. I've only been a fan of minor league baseball. Which I think is part of the point.

Q: If you could read only one local blog for a week, what would it be?

Carleton: Probably Exit133, since Derek seems to know everyone and everything about the city

I just love this take on reading a printed newspaper from the P-I last week. The sweet irony is that the author is a reporter for the newspaper but doesn't get the whole news on print thing.

I skimmed some drier stories, took my time with the local news and skipped right over sports. Before I knew it, my fingers felt grungy and my arms were tired. I was sick of holding up this large, unwieldy, hopelessly disheveled pack of paper. I tossed its dismembered parts on the coffee table. This just isn't my thing.

For the record, I like all forms of news. Digital, print, mobile, whatever. But my job is to help my employer - and my employer's industry - who are "terrified, fascinated and sweetly desperate" to connect with those who "prefer the mouse click to the page turn, the search to the scan, the screen to the sheet." So learning about others news consumption habits is always interesting.

“Free speech is enhanced by civility.”

That’s the view of Tim O’Reilly, who coined the term Web 2.0, and who is trying to push a set of online conversation standards. He’s working with Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales and, according to this New York Times article, hope to create badges for bloggers and web sites to display that would inform visitors of the type of interaction allowed.

For example, anonymous writing might be acceptable in one set; in another, it would be discouraged. Under a third set of guidelines, bloggers would pledge to get a second source for any gossip or breaking news they write about.

The additional interactivity that most news sites offer these days is a precious commodity. It changes news from a lecture to a conversation. But, human nature being what it is, people don’t always play nice.

Menacing behavior is certainly not unique to the Internet. But since the Web offers the option of anonymity with no accountability, online conversations are often more prone to decay into ugliness than those in other media.

We’ve ran into several problems with anonymous users posting inappropriate messages to the comments on our stories. Our bloggers have also run into problems with the conversations on their blogs. It can be seen as the “price of doing business” in this Web 2.0 world, but it’s as much a strain for a traditional business trying to evolve as it is for a lone-ranger blogger who has found a niche and a previously untapped audience.

We hosted more than 50,000 comments on our news stories last year, and I’d guess that 90-95% were on-topic. But we have our bad apples, too. It’s hard for me to understand why some people spend so much time carrying on personal grudges against people they don’t even know, all under the guise of discussing news stories. Some days, it's a very big problem and makes us start to think about doing it differently.

Some web sites have “deputized” trusted members of their online communities and empowered them to delete comments and ban users who violate the rules of conduct. I’m thinking about looking at a similar model to assist us, because the value of the conversation is too precious to us to let a troll or two ruin it for everyone.

According to data from Scarborough, 45% of Pierce County residents have high-speed Internet access at home. About 28% report having no Internet connection at home and 23% access via a dial-up connection (and 4% didn’t answer, in case you are checking my math).

What’s more surprising? That more than a quarter of local residents don’t have Internet access, or that 23% still use a dial-up modem?

By comparison, 53% of Americans had high-speed Internet access at home and 32% have no Internet access (according to this report from a year ago).

Now that we’re publishing some information online and not in the newspaper, we’re constantly talking about striking the balance between the two products. Do we work harder to publish content from blogs and mid-day updates in the printed paper for those who don’t use our web site? Or does that do a disservice to that part of our audience (about 25%) that reads both the paper and the web site?

The evolution continues.

Reporter Craig Hill finds a new way to use GPS and the web in today's Soundlife section. It's called waymarking and is an offshoot of geocaching.

In addition to reporting the story, Craig also came up with a cool idea and contest. He's inviting TNT readers to mark the locations of news articles, as inspired by Waymarking players from Ohio, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire. Here's how he wants you to play:

Find a News Tribune article and determine the location the story is about. Find that location, then record the coordinates from your GPS handset and take a picture there with the article.

Then either post your find at waymarking.com and e-mail us a link, or just e-mail us the information. Don’t forget to include your name and phone number. Those who send us their finds by April 25 will be entered to win a modest prize. Results will be published in the May 3 Adventure section. Send entries to craig.hill@thenewstribune.com.

I love online mapping projects, especially ones that are hyperlocal like this. It breaks down the notion that online communities further isolate real people from one another. If you can learn more about your neighborhood - from your neighbors - that's real "community" by anyone's definition.

One of the fringe benefits of working for a newspaper is the occasional inside access to places that other people don’t get. This morning brought such an occasion for me as I got to accompany State Secretary of Transportation Doug McDonald up the catwalk on the new Narrows Bridge.

A small group, including McDonald and Randy McCarthy from the TNT (he’s the project editor for our bridge coverage), met just after 7 a.m. on the Gig Harbor side for the excursion. Yes, it was a brisk morning but fairly clear, so not a bad day to climb up to the 500-foot high tower. Once there, we had a few minutes to snap photos (that’s McDonald at right taking a picture of me) and I shot this video pan to give you an idea of what we were looking at.

It was way cool. I've been wanting to walk the catwalk ever since they first put one up. It's probably not for everyone, but I thought it was a blast. I only wish we could have stayed up there longer. But McDonald is a busy guy and he wanted to keep moving.

Since this blog is supposed to be about web stuff, you can see the TNT’s bridge coverage here, WSDOT’s bridge page here, and, from the Galloping Gertie age of Narrows Bridges, my interviews with “last man off the bridge” Howard Clifford and tough-as-nails bridge builder Earl White.

Also, if you dig this whole bridge thing, be sure to check out the Washington State History Museum’s new exhibit. (Here’s a link to the main museum site, but I couldn’t find any information on the new exhibit. I know it’s there, though, since we went through it on Saturday.)

A new Seattle-based online-only newspaper launched today. Soon, it may have some new competition.

Ever since the legal battle between Seattle’s two daily newspapers began four years ago, there has been constant conversation inside the industry trying to predict how this will all play out. Some, including me, have wondered if it will produce the country’s first online-only, mainstream daily newspaper.

If the Seattle Times wins, the Post-Intelligencer would be left without a printing press, trucks and many other functions that are "mission critical" to running a printed newspaper. But they’d have journalists and an already popular web site to continue publication of the news.

The economics, according to this story from the Sunday Times, are not quite there yet.

But financial data indicate the P-I's Web site doesn't generate nearly enough revenue yet to support the paper's current news operation. Groves and other experts say Hearst — or a new P-I owner — probably would face a choice between losing money for at least the first few years or putting out an online product with a significantly smaller staff.

Still, as a test case for publishing in an online-only environment, there will be lots of people like me hoping Hearst rolls the dice. Our newsroom goals for 2007 have reporters, photographers and editors attempting to think with a “web-first” mentality. But if the P-I went online-only, we’d all see whether a print operation could truly survive (and thrive?) in a new medium.