I'm glad to see that South Sound Technology Conference will be back for another edition this year. Andrew Fry is going to make it happen again, this time in November.

Last year's gathering focused on blogging and was very interesting with lots of good panelists and discussion. My wish for this year's edition is to focus again on tools for building community and social media. The trick will be to fill an agenda and find speakers that will add to the conversation that started last year.

In case you missed Sunday's paper, you should know about a new section we launched on the web site over the weekend. It's called SoundInfo and it has links to all kinds of information that is relevant to anyone who lives or works (or just cares about) Tacoma, Pierce County or the South Sound. Here's how we describe the site:

Introducing SoundInfo, a gateway to information on topics from government salaries to movie times. From public records and our own reporting, we've created searchable databases and interactive maps that will help you navigate life in the South Sound.

Our executive editor provided an overview with his Sunday column and reporter Jason Hagey took a look at the salaries of Tacoma Power officials to lead the coverage in the newspaper.

This is a popular concept at many newspaper web sites around the country. Most "database pages" that others have launched have generated loads of page views and equal amounts of controversy from public employees concerned for their privacy. We've seen plenty of web traffic but not much in the way of criticism. (Our managing editor blogged about our lack of blowback earlier today.)

Maybe South Sounders are more technically savvy and already knew where to find this data.

RealDuPont.com, a blog I wrote about in February, posted some breaking news today. A house fire in DuPont apparently closed local streets to traffic for a while - good information for a locally focused blog to be reporting. I like that there are photos, too.

Since the proverbial cat's out of the bag, I thought I would acknowledge the news that I will be leaving the TNT to pursue other opportunities. I'll be around full-time through the end of August, however, and may remain on a part-time basis after that until a successor for my position is hired. I plan to continue blogging for the duration, as well.

I will be staying in Tacoma, however, and working on a new book, a new company and some other new opportunities. It was a very difficult decision, but the time had come to make choice. I'll write more about that, and my new ventures, in the coming weeks.

Click the audio link below to test whether you remember the Internet in the good ol' days of baud. (You youngsters don't know how good you have it.)

Click here

The fellow geek who sent this to me now has it as his ring tone. How cool is that?

Derek Young and Kevin Freitas served as the featured speakers at today's City Club luncheon at the Landmark. So Dave Zeeck and I crashed the party to hear their thoughts about social media and local online community.

Both gave informative presentations despite the fact that there was no projector or screen, so no show and tell. So it was challenging for them to explain to those in the audience who didn't know what a blog is or how FeedTacoma works (about half of the audience raised their hand when Derek asked how many had visited Exit 133).

Each has an impressive story to tell, really. And both were quick to credit Tacoma and the community of users on their respective sites for helping them grow into what they've become over the past couple years. I don't think you could pick up either site and put it down in another town and have the same results (something they each alluded to).

It's not the software that makes these sites special, it's the people - both those who created and power them and those who consume and contribute.

The service provider for our weather forecasts is experiencing some serious technical issues, which has interrupted our ability to provide weather information on thenewstribune.com. I'm told by my contact at Weather Underground that they are working on the problem and hope for a fix very soon.

If you are technically inclined and curious, here's what happened:

In the middle of the afternoon today (Tuesday) a technician at Network
Solutions corrupted the DNS NS records for wunderground.com. As a
result, all name lookups to wunderground.com point to a server that knows nothing about wunderground.com, thus resulting in the Network Solutions marketing page. They understand that they caused the problem and have engineers trying to work around the issue.

UPDATE (1:45 p.m.): The service has been restored.

Since many of you who visit this site probably also frequent the Seattle newspaper web sites, you'll want to know about this:

Computer users who visited seattletimes.com, seattlepi.com or NWautos.com between 9 a.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Sunday may have been infected with a virus, The Seattle Times said Monday.

More information here.

If you like jazz, you probably find KPLU on the radio dial in your car. But you can also listen to jazz on your computer any time, any day, by accessing the locally produced mix of jazz music and commentary over the web.

The South Sound is home to one of the leading online radio streams. KPLU's Jazz24, which started streaming jazz music 24 hours a day, 7 days a week in February of this year, attracts more than 70,000 listeners each month. Webcast Metrics ranks it among the top 20 most popular webstreams.

Jazz24 also has a "now playing" feature, updated playlists with links to buy the music you hear, links to KPLU's live studio sessions and concerts and the new NPR Music website, which features content contributed by KPLU.

Internet radio is still a growing segment of the web, even though there is disagreement over how to measure the audience (which affects advertising rates and sales). More than seven million people tuned in to the top web radio stations in December, while one report suggested that more than 20 million people listen in during an average month.

I'm thankful that KEXP has such great streaming over the web – I listen to a healthy dose of it from home (it's against the rules at work) ever since the station stopped broadcasting from Tacoma. This always-on, always-connected culture makes geography obsolete; I recently found an application to listen to satellite radio on my iPhone, too.

That was how reporter Sean Robinson set up the data from a new study released by the Readership Institute as he sent a link to the Newsroom via email today. The study found strong interest in the printed newspaper among readers, which goes directly counter to all the "print is dead" talk we are used to reading.

The short answer is that reading customers aren't deserting newspapers at anything approaching the rate that advertising customers are. That is no consolation for newspaper company employees who are losing their jobs, and it's a challenge, to say the least, for a smaller staff to produce, sell and deliver a high-quality local news report for the people who want it.

But make no mistake: lots of people still want it and lots are paying attention to the local newspaper.

This doesn't surprise me. Even though I'm the editor of the web site, when I'm talking with people in the community I mostly field questions and comments about the newspaper, not the web site. So my anecdotal research mirrors what the Readership Institute found.

Unfortunately that doesn't make the economics of publishing a daily newspaper in today's environment any easier. It's just nice when the news about the industry isn't ALL bad.

Leading last month's most popular reads was Scott Fontaine's piece on the tragic story of Rosemary Dye, a Tacoma woman blazed a trail in seeking a successful career in aviation but was undone by alcohol and drugs.

Top Blogs:

1. Seahawks Insider
2. Lights & Sirens
3. Mariners Insider
4. Ed's Diner
5. Political Buzz
6. Sonics Insider
7. Huskies Insider
8. Bring the Noise
9. Open House
10. Biz Buzz
11. Word on the Street
12. FOB Tacoma
13. Inside the Editorial Page
14. Prep blog
15. Grit City

This ran in today's paper. It would be funnier if it didn't hit so close to home. ;)

If you have visited the comments on our stories recently, I apologize. This is not what we had in mind.

At their best, story comments add layers to a news story that a newsroom simply can't. Local expertise, interaction, discussion and a healthy exchange of ideas based on the news in the report.

At their worst, story comments are nothing more than senseless drivel. Mean-spirited personal attacks between people who know each other's screen names intimately but know very little about their adversaries in real life.

A few years ago, just when blogs were really taking off and hitting mainstream awareness, we started talking about allowing comments on our news stories. Around the same time, we had a focus group of younger readers tell us they would love the opportunity to interact with the news through comments. They said, "We want to play, too."

We welcomed the idea of allowing readers to hold us accountable, just as we try to hold those in power accountable to our community. We looked forward to the exchange of ideas around our news stories between locally interested citizens. But we also knew that some moderation would be critical; a truly open forum could potentially devolve into a cesspool of personal attacks and bitter name-calling (human nature being what it is). And we didn't accurately forecast the volume of comments that we would receive on a daily basis, let alone those that are posted at all hours of the night. So our minor commitment to foster this community – including the ability for users to "flag" comments they deem inappropriate – has proven to be insufficient.

We now find ourselves at a crossroads. The comments on our stories are marred too frequently by back-and-forth attacks between a small number of regulars who accuse one another of past transgressions and posing as alternate identities. We receive complaints that many of the commenters are, in fact, the same person holding court with himself or herself for all to see. And we are not alone; most news sites that allow comments have even worse conversations running on their sites. From what I hear from online editors around the country, we're actually pretty lucky (which is really scary).

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