Comments on: Creating an information asset

By: Joe Boydston

Joe Boydston — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:22:31 +0000

Here's a link that works: http://www.joeboydston.com/paid_davis.html

By: Joe Boydston

Joe Boydston — Tue, 05 May 2009 21:17:16 +0000

I'll argue that web traffic is relative. Uniques are almost as useless as HITS as a metric, simply because they are not applicable to the local advertiser. If I am a local business (without an e-commerce / shipping department) why do I care about ANY unique users outside of my primary market?

In the following chart we see that 94% of DavisWiki users are "passers-by" and that 58% of the DavisEnterprise visitors are "Regulars." Furthermore, because DavisEnterprise is a PAID subscriber only website we can assure local advertisers that we are reaching REAL people in our market. Not random, anonymous "uniques."

The bottom line message I want to point out is that there is a QUALITY vs QUANTITY issue that is often ignored when we talk about increasing traffic to news sites. Many news sites do not come close to selling out their online inventory. Therefore increasing traffic is like adding pages to the print edition, but not running any ads.

Community News websites can not be valued by web traffic alone. We are more than pageviews and uniques, we are more than news. We are the voice of the our community, we are a marketing tool for business. We are credible because we do not hide behind anonymous screen names, we are real people.

- Joe Boydston / Davis Enterprise / McNaughton Newspaper Group

By: News as a hook for context at Newsless.org

News as a hook for context at Newsless.org — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 02:15:29 +0000

[...] creating information assets, we make it likelier that our information will find our audiences when they want it. Consider the [...]

By: Exit interviews for departing journalists at Newsless.org

Exit interviews for departing journalists at Newsless.org — Fri, 23 Jan 2009 03:42:17 +0000

[...] interviews for every city would be a marvelous trove of knowledge, the beginnings of a stellar information asset. The interviews could be conducted by anyone — local bloggers, the reporter’s former [...]

By: Captain Fairly-Obvious

Captain Fairly-Obvious — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 22:36:47 +0000

Please read this:
http://www.kottke.org/08/10/megamovies-tv-shows-as-dayslong-movies

it’s hacking on the same fundamental thing, from an entirely different angle.

Cheerses,

By: Matt

Matt — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 21:34:43 +0000

I love the idea of turning “Most Popular Stories” into a more fully-featured app.

In general, I think exposing more metadata about stories and doing stuff with it makes sense the more asset-ized those stories are. If your stories are only intended to be relevant for three days, then metadata doesn’t really make sense. If they’re intended to be current indefinitely, then you can make it tremendously interesting. In addition to “Most Popular,” we might find things like “Most Corrected” or “Most Edited” valuable.

As for your #2, I think a key characteristic of any good website is a propensity for linking out often and intelligently. We know that most of the highest-traffic sites on the Web are also some of the linkiest. (See, e.g., Drudge.)

By: Tim

Tim — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 03:41:20 +0000

I’m wondering about two things, and since the newspaper I read most frequently online or off is The New York Times, I’ll pose them in reference to that paper.

1) What do you make of the “Most Emailed” or “Most Blogged” links that appear in the sidebar of just about every Times article online? Some of them are section-specific, some of them are site-wide. Those always, always generate more talk and attention than the “related stories” links — speaking at least for myself and for the people I know, who will often open blog posts with “the most emailed story at the Times is…”

This is clearly something that is net-dependent, and also something that borrows a good deal from the virtues of both Google and Wikipedia, which is that attention begets attention, and that people often want to see the same news items that many other people have helped flag as newsworthy.

It is also pretty obvious that the Times could do more in terms of maintaining that resource as wealth rather than just income — perhaps by allowing you to see the most emailed stories in the year, or to see which stories drew the most attention in a given week or month some date in the past. Which stories were most emailed the week after September 11? Those might be the ones I’d want to read on or around the anniversary.

2) What do you make of op-ed writers like Frank Rich who actively work hyperlinks into their op-eds — sometimes to Times stories and sometimes off-site? I have to think that some of this has to give his editors (and the folks interested in monetizing attention) some fits — on the one hand, great, you’re helping up our total pageviews; but on the other, you’re sending traffic to the Washington Post? what’s wrong with you?