Neil Budde is Editor in chief of Yahoo! News, Finance and Sports, and a member of the iFOCOS Search Working Group.

I first became intrigued by search technology when I joined Dow Jones in 1987. The visionary leader of Dow Jones Information Services, Bill Dunn, had just convinced the company to purchase a pair of Connection Machine computers from Thinking Machines Corp. The promise: that the natural language searching and relevance feedback capabilities of the massively parallel computers could open up the vast databases of Dow Jones News/Retrieval to a huge audience of business information users and move the business outside the library and information specialist marketplace.

Of course, the timing was all wrong: the technology wasn’t capable of searching sizable collections of information fast enough and the dial-up command-line interfaces of the time weren’t suitable for this form of searching. Fast forward to today and you find much larger amounts of information being indexed and searched in milliseconds. Yet we still face many of the same problems: users who enter 1-2 word queries and then dig only so deep into the results as well as interfaces that still don’t make search that simple. What is the answer? I’m looking forward to searching for it.

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Oren Michels is CEO of Mashery.

My closest cousin had cancer surgery yesterday. Based on what we (her close family and friends) have learned, this is the sort of cancer you really, really don’t want. Of course, we don’t know that for sure. After all, when we first got the preliminary diagnosis a couple weeks ago, everyone in the family began searching for answers. Searching for clues as to her course of treatment. And her prognosis. We all wanted to find out about that.

And we all found the same sites, the same obscure papers about this obscure cancer, papers that had somehow managed to rise to the top of the SEO heap. Why these ones? Were they “right?” Is the median survival rate 14 months? Says who? When? The prognosis for someone diagnosed ten years ago is likely diffenent than that of someone diagnosed more recently. And on and on.

Search as we know it today fails us at times like this. Despite what Google says, they have not organized the world’s information and made it universally accessible and useful. Far from it. A dozen of us found the same info on Krukenberg tumors, and yet we know little more now than we knew before we’d heard of them. Although this cancer is obscure, much has been written about it, and there are profound debates going on in medical circles about how it happens, where it comes from, and how to treat it. But little of that emerges on the first page of search results, or the second, or the tenth. But because Valerie is family, we persevere to the fifteenth, the twenty-fifth. Highly unusual search engine user behavior, I know. But totally reasonable in light of this situation. Yet we still see the same content dressed in slightly different skin.

How could search be better? Make it temporal - don’t just tell me what people are linking to; tell me when they linked to it, and how new and fresh the content is - blog search does this on some level, but non-blog content has as much need to be “fresh” as blog content. Allow us to search for a topic over time - searching for “Enron” today brings up a lot of information on the collapse and bankruptcy, but little on how it was perceived and written about at its peak. Hindsight is interesting, but we learn even more by looking at contemporary accounts of its success and gleaning understanding that will allow us to pattern match to current events.

Differentiate between original content and meta sites. Speaking of meta, focus on metadata. I’m much more interested in a site or blog dealing directly with Krukenberg than with a popular cancer site that happens to mention it; accurate metadata can help here. So can some sort of measure of authority…though that is a hard one to nail down. But we should still try. Get better at deduping, and weeding out similar or even identical content from multiple providers. Make it so the first page of ten results provides a broad look at the subject from a variety of categories of sources, and then drill down on “more like this”

Better results. More relevance. More timeliness. More focus on the desired subject.

Then what? Get people to use it. That is all about one thing - web service APIs. It is highly unlikely that anyone will dethrone the current search market leaders on virality alone, and few startups have the resources to compete using traditional marketing and promotional techniques. New search, and the new content that it finds, will gain traction if existing and newly emerging high-traffic sites incorporate that search in a seamless user experience. That takes APIs that are open, with easy and flexible integration into existing sites and applications.

I look forward to our sessions. I have no doubt that we will all learn a lot. Thanks for including me!

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Unaware of a shooting in a dormitory that left two people dead, Virginia Tech graduate student Jamal al Barghouti headed across campus to meet with his advisor. Nearing Norris Hall he ran into police, guns drawn, rushing inside. As al Barghouti took cover, he pulled out his Nokia camera-phone and started recording. Then came the haunting sound of 26 gunshots. As the volley increased in intensity he unexpectedly recorded his own startled voice: “Wow,” he said.

Across campus, freshman Bryce Carter was hiding in his dorm room. When word reached him that fellow students had been shot, he went online. After assuring friends that he was alive, he wrote these works on Bryce’s Journal, his blog: “My friends could be dead.”

Over at the business school, computer science-business technology major Kevin Cupp was locked down, distanced from the computer servers he manages as webmaster of Planet Blacksburg. So he sent an instant message on his cell phone to Twitter, the new digital network where people describe what they are doing at the moment. His first of many posts that day: “Trapped inside of Pamplin, shooter on campus, they won’t let us leave.

What we experienced about the horrific events on a black day in Blacksburg owes to a savvy, social generation connected emotionally and technologically to its media. Their eyewitness descriptions, photos, video and reporting from a remote, rural Virignia town – one of the world’s first connected communities — made a story visceral to the world.

The ability to instantly capture and disseminate information at a time when it was most needed, as well as to communicate with each other across time and geography, has not only helped unite a community but has become a real-time example of how personal media empowers and defines communication in today’s connected society.

Watching events unfold, the shift in the power of media was perceptible. Traditional broadcasters and publishers competently covered the tragic events in Blacksburg. But the story belongs to Virginia Tech students. They were at once reporters, witnesses and subjects of the deadliest shooting in U.S. history. It was like watching a new kind of reality show where the stars used their devices, their social networks, and their wits to survive and to cope.

News organizations responded by plundering material posted on the web and pumping their own content into the online ether. The Internet encouraged a collective expression of emotion that was faithfully reported by traditional media outlets. As if the world outside newsrooms didn’t already know, CBS News ran this story a day after the shootings: Students turn to web in time of tragedy. The Los Angeles Times went with: Students Trace a Tragedy Online.

So, too, did adults. While social networking sites such as Facebook and My Space became an integral part of the story, millions turned to the sites produced by mainstream news outlets for the latest from Blacksburg. But the Internet had done more than create a distribution center for news and information; it became a place for news to happen. An online community emerged around the story. The immediacy of the medium helped to relay both the scope of news as well as the full emotion of the event. Once again, citizen journalists armed with mobile phones supplied invaluable material, including pictures and video footage of the shootings, to established news organizations.

Newspapers lost more hallowed ground in the media war for immediate attention and influence. An editor for The Washington Post lamented the “dead-tree” limitations of covering a breaking story that made newspaper editions the harbingers of yesterday’s news tomorrow. A day late and many breaking developments short, the mighty Post was relegated to this headline on Tuesday, April 17, a full day after the shootings: “Gunman Kills 32 at Virginia Tech In Deadliest Shooting in U.S. History.”

There can be no denying now that We Media – the ecosystem in which everyone is media – is the dominant force of communication in our culture. The digital network has changed the way we create, access and distribute news and information.

Virginia Tech’s students shined even as it they were portrayed as victims. One articulate student-witness set the record straight while being interviewed by a testy CNN reporter. “Don’t you get it?” he asked the reporter. “Its our story, not yours.”

As the student went off to awaiting cameras for a series of interviews and special reports with the other television networks, a CNN producer channeled the network’s coverage to a report on counseling services on campus.

The TV moment recalled the recent complaint by NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams that the had spent a career as a journalist only to compete now with “some guy named Vinny.”

But it was not Vinny with whom Williams had to compete in Blacksburg. It was Jamal, Bryce and Kevin. They are, for the moment, the celebrated journalists of their generation, embedded correspondents reporting from a war zone with all the courage and authenticity that radio reporter Edward R. Murrow famously exhibited covering the bombing of London during World War II.

Undeniably less sophisticated than Morrow’s reporting, their citizen journalism is shown, replayed, recast, remixed and referenced over-and-over again on the Internet as well as on traditional newscasts. The unfettered, unfiltered coverage of the shootings is accepted for what it is, unapologetic for its lack of cohesiveness or for its personal perspective. The audience understands the story is personal and incomplete, a work in progress that continues long after the network camera crews and out-of-town reporters leave Blacksburg. Suddenly, the Internet looks less like a threat to ‘old media’, and more like a resource it can easily exploit.

The We Media Generation now looks to pick up the pieces, to remember their friends, their community, and to share their stories of survival with the rest of the world. It is the informing story of their lives. No wonder they asked NBC and the outside media to leave for violating their fragile community by repeatedly overplaying, then replaying over and over, the grotesque rants of a killer, once a disturbed fellow student.

The story of a generation turned quickly to coping with unimaginable tragedy, a cruel and unforeseen twist for college students living in the sanctuary of a college campus. Amid tragedy there was pathos and authenticity in the way they mourned, grieved and supported one another through public acts of catharsis.

At the Tuesday night vigil for their slain comrades Virginia Tech students lit “The Drill” with candles and the glow of screens on their cell phones. Virtual vigils emerged across the web. Happy Slip, a vlogger in New York City, posted a photo sent via a cell phone from the vigil. These words accompanied the photo: “Know that a community here in New York was on their knees praying for you tonight.” Thousands of bloggers shared similar sentiments. Technorati, a web site that indexes blogs, tracked nearly 30,000 posts about Virginia Tech the following day.

As expressions of sorrow and support, memorials proliferated on the web. West Virginia Blogger collected links to the personal web sites of victims, many on My Space or Facebook, as a way of paying tribute. “It’s one thing to hear a list of names on TV, or read them online,” she wrote, “but if you take a second to view a bit of the person’s personal life it will give you a deeper understanding of that person.”

Forums were established on sites such as VTtragedy.com and VTincident.com for students to express their condolences and grief. The creators of OneDayBlogSilence.com proposed a day of silence in the blogosphere to pay tribute to the victims. Citizens of the virtual world Second Life established a memorial for visitors to leave virtual notes and flowers.

The big news organizations did their best to compete with the raw elegance of user-generated tributes, but their stories seemed trite amid the outpouring of personal expression.

As the world tries to understand what happened in Blacksburg, the conversation should once and for all dispel the “derivative myth” spun by newspapers and news broadcasters. The myth holds that most news of value is created and owned by the newspapers who publish it or by the broadcasters who air it. While there is no denying that news organizations may add value to news by employing large numbers of specialists to gather, create, edit, produce and distribute it, the notion that they either “own’ the news or that they are the original source for it becomes irrelevant, if not absurd, when everyone is media.

Today’s news tumbles through a connected society, spiraling through media, changing as it goes, an organic story with no beginning, middle or end. What seems chaotic is actually a story arc that assumes clarity, context and meaning as it unfolds through a proliferation of sources, many accessible to anyone. The days of once-a-day publishing cycles and scheduled news broadcasts are mere supplements to a continuous stream of news and information available any time through a variety of sources and ubiquitous devices.

With their cell phones, networks and knowledge of place, Virginia Tech students were better prepared to report the events overtaking them than the swarm of professional reporters who descended upon Blacksburg following the shootings. On camera the students appeared more composed, informed and sure-footed than the confused reporters from the big cities.

Community – a word that is now used to describe the digital connections among people, as well as the social and emotional ones – was the word heard time-and-time again from Blacksburg. Extended by personal media, the Blacksburg community quickly expanded to include students on campuses everywhere, as well as a diverse, caring generation connected to each other through digital media.

“Today we are all Hokies,” student leaders proclaimed when asked by reporters how the tragic events would impact Virginia Tech. In a show of support, fellow students at universities across the U.S. created video tributes and memorials on You Tube, some remixing an audio track of Avril Lavigne’s “Keep Holding On” with slideshows of photos grabbed from Flickr. Many of the videos ended with a slide displaying the logo of their universities next to the words “today we are all Hokies.”

Powerful forces were in play in Blacksburg that week. One was the invisible infrastructure of digital networks, wired and wireless, connecting a geographically isolated community to itself and to the world. Another was the connected culture of young adults, savvy content creators and communicators who instinctively use social media as integral parts of their life. When shots rang out, the story unfolded through their devices and their networks.

A new generation of media experts provided an indelible record of what happened on a terrible day in Blacksburg. They have created a lasting tribute to and by its community. The way we are informed will never be the same.

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A couple of recent sketches and "what ifs" by designers offer a counterpoint - or should I say, complement - to our Search Working Group conversation about better search: what about better web sites?

Imagine if Amazon depended on customers searching generic search engines to find books and merchandise they wanted to purchase. People do that - but Amazon built a much bigger business around e-commerce by making it incredibly easy for people to not only find items they know they want  to buy - by searching for them - but also items they don’t know they want to buy - discovered by a powerful recommendation engine that matches your past purchases and opinions with those of other people. Hence: "People who bought this book also bought …"

Back in 2001 Amazon inspired Ellen Kampinsky, Shayne Bowman and Chris Willis to re-imagine news as a social process of discovery. It was called Amazoning The New.

Travis Smith (an occasional contributor to the iFOCOS blog), along with HOP studios (and life) partner Susannah Gardner, have attempted a similar "treatment" with a new model: Flickr. See: Flickring The News

Meanwhile, the UK’s Press Gazette pointed me to Oliver Reichenstein of Information Achitects Japan, who re-imagined The Washington Post as if it were a wiki.

Sure, you could now try to Digg the News, Gather The News or Reddit The News; or forget what-ifs and dive in to Newsvine, Now Public or NewsTrust (I’m an advisor); or splice it all together in Netvibes

What I’d *really* like to see is something a bit more radical and a lot more beautiful. I’m ready for Absolut News.

So - anyone interested in launching (and leading) an iFOCOS Design Working Group? Goals: crank out a series of product sketches and concepts - and maybe inspire someone to invest and build a few of them for real.

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Jeff Given is the IT Operations Manager for the Office of Scientific and Technical Information (OSTI) located in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. This post is a pre-cursor to the iFOCOS Search Working Group meeting on April 24th, 2007.

About OSTI - OSTI’s mission is to collect and disseminate scientific and technical information (STI) for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). Several key technologies support our efforts to disseminate DOE STI, including search and retrieval for our internal collection and federated search for collections of interest to the DOE, but not physically housed at OSTI. OSTI’s main public STI collection consists of approximately 2.3 million bibliographic citations and 150,000 electronically available full text reports. OSTI’s key search and retrieval products include Information Bridge (electronic full text), Energy Citations Database (bibliographic citations), ePrint Network (draft journal articles and scholarly papers), and Science.gov (federated search of authoritative science information provided by the US government).

Relevance, for OSTI and most likely many other similar agencies, provides a constant challenge. In order to get government-funded science information into the hands of researchers and interested public, we have placed major significance on including the major enterprise search engines as part of our dissemination strategy. The inefficient crawls of the past have been replaced by new methodologies, supported largely by the recently adopted Site Map Protocol.

It is significant to note that approximately half of our web traffic to publicly available STI is derived from referrals from Google, MSN, and Yahoo. We expect to see this increase significantly in the next 12 months, and is a good indicator that the enterprise search engines such as Google are the standard onramp to the information superhighway (See: Search, while dominant, is not very good).

Even though we have implemented several technologies to assist the user in finding material of high relevance quickly, we still feel there is a significant amount of work to be done in this area.

OSTI’s mission to collect and disseminate DOE STI underlies our fundamental vision to advance science. Accomplishing this involves many facets, however ultimately it boils down to gathering the right resources and putting the most relevant results in front of the right people, and to do so in a constantly changing landscape. The real limiting factor for knowledge diffusion is people’s time. The focus of all efforts to improve web search should be to get the most relevant content to the user in the shortest possible time with the least amount of user effort.

So, what constitutes a better search?

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Topix.net  sponsored Podtech.net to produce a "man on the street" video, asking a few ordinary people (and a few not-so-ordinary media insiders, like webware.com editor Rafe Needleman, KQED Executive Director of News Raul Ramirez and craigslist founder Craig Newmark): "What’s missing from local news?"

They also posed the question to a few people at this week’s Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco.

Obviously it was a loaded question. I’d say fairly loaded given the widepread dissatisfaction with journalism in the U.S. Our research earlier this year  found that 72 percent of Americans are dissatisified with the quality of American journalism.

Common answers in this video: Too little relevancy, too much sad and depressing stuff.

Sigh. Another plea for happy news. Maybe that’s the Podtech niche.

Check it out here: What is Missing from Local News?

Sidenote: Podtech should have been clearer about the nature of this video. The video is explained this way:

"To commemorate Topix’s revamped site, PodTech’s Rio Pesino traveled around San Francisco and attended the Web 2.0 Expo asking journalists, bloggers, and locals what is missing from local news."

Topix CEO Rich Skrenta tells me his company sponsored the video. I have no problem with that. But Podtech should have said so more clearly. The video includes Topix logos at the beginning and end. That may be clear enough for some, or maybe Podtech regulars understand that all its content is sponsored. I don’t know if it is or isn’t, and that’s my point. I can’t tell. I don’t know what the deal is at that site.

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iFOCOS President Andrew Nachison appeared on the PBS NewsHour on Wednesday, April 18, 2007. He discussed the April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech shooting - and how the digital media witnesses and others used to tell the story reflects the rise of We Media.

Real Audio | Download MP3

“The story is unfolding all around us. Marshall McLuhan used the notion of media being accoustic and you really get a sense of that today, that everybody is a story teller. The information is coming at us from many different sources. And the Blacksburg shooting, for me at least, was a really poignant example of this.”

“Young people do this intuitively and naturally without thinking about it, without a sense of wonder when they send a text message or they send an email or they shoot a video or they post a message to their friends on MySpace. But it’s not just young people. That’s the exaggeration. Technology is allowing people to share information and to share feelings and to tell stories in a way that just wasn’t possible before. And the big story is not that we’ve got all this wonderful fabulous technology making life better, the big story is that story-telling is exploding by virtue of this technology.”

“What’s news and what’s journalism, those are professional definitions that help us define work we do as professionals, or not as professionals. But story-telling is much broader than that, and a lot of what we’re seeing is reflecting the emotional impact of this experience.”

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The discussion at We Media Miami on next-generation search concepts, chaired by Jim Kennedy of The Associated Press, was both vibrant and inconclusive. So we’re going further. We’ve launched the iFOCOS Search Working Group. The group will hold its kickoff meeting April 24, 2007, in Santa Clara, California - using meeting space generously provided by Yahoo!

Members include:
Neil Budde, GM, Yahoo! News; Suranga Chandratillake, founder/CTO, Blinkx; Jeff Clavier, Managing Partner, SoftechVC; Steven Donahue, Professor, Miami Dade College; Jeffrey S. Given, science.gov/Computer Operations Manager, Office of Scientific and Technical Information, U.S. Dept. of Energy; Jim Kennedy, VP Strategy, Associated Press; Michael Mannes, VP Strategy, Gannett; Oren Michels, CEO, Mashery; Andrew Nachison, President, iFOCOS; Julie Rutherford, Marketing Director, WashingtonPost.Newsweek Interactive; Rich Skrenta, CEO, Topix.

This is the first of what we hope will become many action-oriented teams initiated and driven by members. Working Groups are an antidote to the tedium of best practices meetings - our working groups will focus on better practices and results. If you and your company haven’t become members of iFOCOS yet - please do. Our impact and ability to convene projects like the search working group depends on the support and participation of members. Please review the membership details and benefits, join now, and then help us push the agenda and outcomes further.

To join now, click here.

About Search
Could internet search work better? What would a next-generation, “better” search experience look like, especially for discovering news and current events information? What is “better” - and what would it take to get there?

This working group of experts representing key constituents from search and content companies will share ideas and assess opportunities, if any, to collaborate on initiatives, standards or recommendations that could enable independent innovation and improved means to access more relevant and more informative search results across digital platforms.

The goal of this working group is to seek a next-generation vision for making sense of the world’s information. The result could be no more than a set of recommendations, or creative ideas applied in unexpected ways; or perhaps action among members to develop a new data standard or some other collaborative project.

We want to keep our working groups as small as possible - 10 - 20 people - but have enough brainpower, key constituents and influence represented to consider actions if any emerge.

Our goal is to convene and facilitate the smallest group possible to be effective and well-rounded, with a potential to collaborate and have influence on next steps (which might include other participants). We’ll post notes, position statements and conclusions on the iFOCOS blog to seek additional input, expand the conversation and discover other collaborators.

Roles
Working groups are driven by the members. iFOCOS will facilitate a working group’s creation, initial information sharing and kickoff meeting to push the discussion further, and ask participants to self-organize on subsequent actions and recommendations. Follow-up actions might require some financial commitment to cover support or development costs, if any emerge. That will be discussed at the kickoff meeting or in follow-up conversations.

This is meant to be collaborative and driven by the working group members - not merely advisory to or driven by iFOCOS. You can help shape and move the agenda forward, debate and push back on assumptions or recommend alternative approaches. As a learning experience the dialog might inspire new R&D and innovation within individual member companies irrespective of shared actions or outcomes.

Members: If you’d like to join the search working group - or start a new working group on a different subject - contact Andrew Nachison at iFOCOS.

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Jim Kennedy is VP of Strategy for The Associated Press. He is also a member of the iFOCOS Search Working Group, which is holding its first meeting April 24, 2007, and of the iFOCOS Advisory Board.

Over the past six years, the online function of search has become the dominant content entry point for digital information consumers. More than 7 billion searches were launched in March, up 14 percent from a year ago, and the titans of online search – Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL – touch nearly all of the active Internet users in the United States in the course of an average month.

Desktop search, by anyone’s measure, is the most popular on-ramp to the information superhighway. Social online networking may have gained some ground as an Internet entry point in the past couple of years – thanks to the MySpace-Facebook-YouTube phenomenon — but search has even greater days ahead with the mobile environment and the living room still up for grabs.

Think about it this way: While digital citizens may always need their “friends,” they’ll need a “remote” even more in order to navigate the many screens in their digital lives. Search is that remote.

If that’s the future we expect, then those of us in the information business – content providers and technologists alike – have a lot of work to do. Search, while dominant, is not very good. It seemed to plateau once it reached “good enough” for general use, and many stakeholders turned their attention to monetizing the traffic flow through advertising technology. That was sorely needed, of course, for revenue generation, but it didn’t do much to improve the relevance or timeliness of underlying search results.

The research firm, Outsell Inc., reports that the search “failure rate” for desktop information seekers keeps rising, and at last report was 30 percent, based on the firm’s annual survey. That suggests that search only satisfies the user seven out of 10 times, which really isn’t good enough for a dominant online entry point.

Before the world turned its attention to search and contextual advertising, search was improving rapidly. Indeed, Alta Vista and, later, Google rose to prominence on the strength of their information search capabilities in those early days. That led others to go to work on improving search, and enterprise engines, such as Autonomy and FAST, and many vertical search engines emerged and advanced search technology considerably.

Nonetheless, general online search still flunks 30 percent of the time. In the case of news, the failure rate could be even higher. Try putting anything close to a real-time keyword into the plain-vanilla search of the giant engines and see what you get. If it’s a running story, maybe you’ll get a development from a day or two ago, from a site that’s optimized for search but not necessarily an authority on the subject or close geographically to the action. At times, the results can be laughable.

That’s probably OK for the desktop, and we put up with it, because the next search is just a keyword away. But try that on a mobile connection, or imagine fumbling with a TV-remote search, only to get nonsense results. No one will be able to monetize that experience, and users likely won’t put up with it.

In fact, search might begin to fade as the great engine of digital revenue growth and give way to recommendation engines, or we might even fall back to a destination-based experience of some sort to minimize the pain of lousy search.

Perhaps these outcomes are overstated, but there’s no hype in the nagging failure rate of general search. What’s more, this failure rate is working to the distinct disadvantage of the very content providers who could provide the information consumers are looking for. Online newspapers, for instance, are struggling to surface in general search results, largely because their content is not optimized for real-time discovery.

How can this picture be changed in a competitive online world where content providers and distributors are focused on their own proprietary agendas? It would seem an impossible task. But what if the various “stakeholders” in search – content creators, technology companies, search engines and other online distributors – came together to identify key initiatives, which when combined might raise the tide for all ships?

That is the hope that inspires the working group discussion of search being sponsored by iFocos.org. As the organization has done for the citizens’ media space, with its We Media research and conferences, the objective of the working group discussion is to raise questions and awareness that might enhance the evolution of the search ecosystem.

That’s buzz-speak for a simple goal: Let’s open the floor for ideas that could improve general search. Are there initiatives various constituents could undertake – individually or collectively — that would significantly improve the search user experience? What are the costs and benefits of those initiatives? What is the potential return on investment?

For The Associated Press, I can speak directly to a major metadata initiative that we hope will establish some standards for the categorization and tagging of content across the daily news industry. We expect this effort to result in an AP “stylebook” for indexing news that would be roughly comparable to the writing and editing stylebook followed by news organizations around the world.

Standardization – in this case, for tagging – is one example of an initiative undertaken by one stakeholder that may be very useful to others. Are there more? Let’s talk about it on April 24.

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A friend at a relatively large media corporation recently asked me to evaluate one of that company’s newspaper web sites. I removed any references to the specific paper/company not so much because I’m avoiding picking on them, but because most of the things I list I’ve seen elsewhere and I want more people at more companies to understand what to look for and why I feel they are important.

It’s very fun these days to obsess over various Web 2.0 technologies and how to integrate them into your existing site. But keeping up with the items listed below can do a lot to help companies grow and maintain readership.

Here goes nothing:

Improper copyright year in the footer - If the reader thinks you don’t know what year it is, it doesn’t do much to help credibility. I subsequently found this in a lot of places. When this extends into the second quarter of the year (as it now does as of this posting), it looks much worse than seeing it in Jan. and Feb.

Contact info without a means of communicating via the web — The site listed a collection of phone numbers for News tips, Classifieds, Display advertising, and Subscriptions. But there was no link to pages for these departments or Web-based email forms. This can frustrate the reader and cost your company a good chunk of change in the man hours needed to answer all those phone calls.

Articles with no comment functionality – I had the chance to integrate Topix.net into the iFocos site and was impressed with how easy the integration was. Such a service, or others like it integrated into the bottom of each article, could both enable reader feedback and expose the article to a wider audience. Also this wasn’t a matter of the site not encouraging any comments, as it’s blog had them fully enabled.

Registration requirement — I think the ESPN.com’s Insider approach is much better than preventing a user from seeing anything at all. If you’re going to require registration, I feel you should give the reader a tease of the first two or three grafs.

Hiding back-door views of your site — I’m a view-source kind of guy. I deleted some of the URL for a blog post, down to http://www.DOMAIN.com/CATEGORY/ and found a “test page” was exposed. This should probably be an inventory of all the company’s blogs. I also noticed that it said “Powered by Movable Type 3.16″ Much has happened to Movable Type since version 3.16. Keeping on such an upgrade path can sometimes uncover new publishing, revenue and social networking opportunities for your company.

Make your headlines clickable – Not everyone instinctively knows to click on a “permalink.” Having both the word “permalink” and the headline clickable could result in increased page vews.

OK, I lied. I am now meandering into some more Web 2.0 territory. But don’t worry, none of this requires a computer science degree or anything …

Google maps indexing - I started playing with integrating Google maps into Movable Type recently for a client. I think this is an amazing opportunity for companies to explore. What I envision is a Google map that, when you click on a specific region, your last X number of articles, blog posts etc. that relate to that area show up.

Very targeted advertising could be integrated as well in the pop-up windows in the map. When users mouse over one of the markers on the map. Constructing such a map is no more complicated than creating specialized RSS feeds.

Go where the high school kids are — Why not create an account on MySpace that features links to your latest content? You could get thousands of potential young readers to be your paper’s “friend” and communicate with them on a level newspaper execs haven’t even let themselves ever dream about.

Recruit and host guest bloggers, and make them a real part of your publishing effort – Several news sites are warming up to the idea of “guest bloggers” as part of a citizen journalism effort. However, the areas these fine folks often post into is not always fully utilized by the newspaper company. Including small widgets showcasing “Latest headlines” or articles and features related to what the guest is blogging about seems to be a natural fit that would enhance the user’s experience with the guest blog and the company’s ability to reach a larger audience.

Speaking of reaching a larger audience … claim your blog on Technorati! – Once you’ve created these blogs for guests, take the next step and get them on Technorati’s radar. Make sure the ping settings in your publishing system are correct, and embed the little bit of HTML that enables visitors to make that blog one of their favorites on Technorati.

This is obviously just a small snapshot of opportunities and mistakes out there. We’d love to hear other from you. Comment below and get those gripes off your chest!

Chad Capellman is an occasional contributor and site constructor for iFocos. His LinkedIn profile can be viewed at http://www.linkedin.com/in/capellman

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