Links of Note: June 18, 2007
US newspaper to launch 30 hyper-local sites(Journalism.co.uk)
The Chicago Sun-Times is expanding its community journalism efforts to 30 Chicago-area neighborhoods.
From Journalism.co.uk:The new sites will expand to established Chicago neighborhoods."The sites will be grouped at NeighborhoodCircle.com, which launched three test sites in suburbs of Chicago in April this year, and cover small areas of the city that could be home to as few as 10,000 people.
What I like about an initiative like this is that it relies upon the resources and the brand identity of an established news source. What I don't like is that it fails to answer a fundamental question: Why would anyone contribute to this thing?
Community outreach and reporting for the greater good only go so far, especially when work/family schedules continue to grow more demanding. The Sun-Times project is asking a lot of its citizen volunteers:
"A team of community journalists moderate and fact check new material prior to publication, the sites then rely on the community to update information on the sites to keep the content relevant or to inform them if older content becomes irrelevant."
The Journalism.co.uk story doesn't address this central question, nor was I able to find details on NeighborhoodCircle.com or in the original press release announcing the initiative.
Random House - Widgets and Web Services Done Right
(Read/WriteWeb)
Read/Write Web has a nice breakdown of Random House's widget strategy (yes, they have one).
"Random House is leveraging its information in a controlled way to businesses and exposes it in a viral way to end users. This is savvy and economical. Their widget implementation nails the user experience, packing the key functions of searching and browsing into the widget."A day is quickly approaching when Widgets will be a must-have component for all serious information-based Web sites. The compartmentalization of Web sites is already an antiquated strategy -- sites of all types need to look for ways to make their content work for them both within a site and in micro chunks (like widgets).
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