Flickr

Not only are we not getting that nasty warning when we go to Flickr from inside the newsroom, but folks on the Charlotte Flickr group are posting links to our news website from their pictures. Somebody did this for the business story about South 21 at this Flickr space.

Now we can do that too and drive traffic from Flickr to charlotte.com, even at work.

Better navigation, fewer page views?

Some folks are wondering why traffic as measured in page views has dropped off at USA.com.
Could be the companies doing the counting, or it could be the way page views are counted, or it could be faster, easier navigation, suggest a couple of new comments at Howard Owens' blog.
Analogy: planned obsolescence? If we let traffic metrics drive our decisions too much, we'll make our pages more complicated to drive up page views. (We'll make cars that don't last so customers will buy more replacement cars.)
Honda and Toyota didn't go there.
I wish there was a way to measure quality time and satisfaction of visitors as well: did they spend lots of time reading and viewing, or did they spend lots of time trying to find what they needed? Sounds like a graduate degree research project, or Eyetrack study.
Can we quantify satisfaction? I.E., does a 1-minute visit mean a visitor was dissatisfied, while a 3-minute visit mean they found what they needed?

BBC experiments

A BBC reporter uses social media to drive readers to the BBC, and to tell the story behind the story.
Read here.

Can't find it?

One other small thing we can do now:
If you read something in the paper, but can't find it on the website, email the online message group.
If you see a misspelled headline or a missing headline, email the online message group.
That group is responsive, even early in the morning, and they appreciate the extra eyes. Diedre McGruder made a fix this morning to post online Lisa Zagaroli's Inside Washington column, which is important to me and my neighbors as 8th District residents.
And you'll feel better, knowing you did what you could. If you know the editor or reporter who initiated the story, you can let them know their story was missing from online, and perhaps they should check how they do webcodes in CCI.
Along the way, you can hope for a better way. But for now, this is something we can do.

Q&A with NYT's Digital News Editor

Jim Rogers, editor of digital news, has been answering reader questions this week. Check it out.

"The other example we have faced since the dawn of the digital era is the need to pursue and present news on nytimes.com around the clock, while at the same time maintaining the standards and depth that the paper has been known for throughout its century-and-a-half existence. We are still learning the best way to do that and in the next few days, I'll try to point to some examples where we have succeeded."

Including a question (kinda far into it) about moderating reader comments:

"The first thing that readers should know is that unlike some other news sites, we review every single comment that readers send in. We have considered trying software that filters profanity or doing what other sites do and allowing readers to flag objectionable comments. But so far we have not found anything that substitutes for having trained editors or news assistants read each one to make sure it is suitable for publication."

Liberating control freaks, fostering collaboration

It's not at easy as this slideshow makes it look.
Still, it's worth a click.
LibraryBytes: Suggestions on liberating control freaks ...

The Impact of Google Maps

More from this month's Wired: How Google Maps are Changing The Way We See the World
It's one of the cover stories.

"...In the past two years, map providers like Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo have created tools that let anyone with an Internet connection layer their own geographic obsessions on top of ever-more-detailed road maps and satellite images. A host of collaborative annotation projects have appeared — not to mention tens of thousands of personal map mashups — that plot text, links, data, and even sounds onto every available blank space on the digital globe. It's become a sprawling, networked atlas — a "geoweb" that's expanding so quickly its outer edges are impossible to pin down."