The American Journalism Review has an interesting article on the efforts of traditional news organizations in embracing video. This has already been mentioned in several blogs. Roanoke.com's own Evelio Contreras is quoted towards the end. Check it out.
This week, we introduce our newest webcast -- the ExtraCast.
It's a weekly entertainment webcast that we'll post each Wednesday, so it'll be good through the weekend.
The name is derived from our daily features section, Extra. Think of this webcast as the online supplement to what’s already in print (and online.) Each week, the ExtraCast will feature a visual rundown of the top events coming up in the region -- with special emphasis on audio clips from bands and a featured video segment.
Do you have trouble visualizing a product's size when shopping online? Check out www.sizeasy.com. The site operates on the wiki principle, allowing users to add measurements for products and compare their size to other objects.
Are you on Facebook?
Of course you are. After all, the social networking site has over 54 million active users, with an average of 250,000 new registrations per day.
With numbers like that, we'd be crazy not to have a Roanoke Times presence on Facebook.
We're not crazy -- are we?
It's been about a week since we launched DataSphere, and so far, the response has been interesting. There were a few write-ups in some blogs and it was also the centerpiece item on Poynter.org earlier this week.
In addition to the position of a Data Delivery Editor and the purpose behind publishing databases on the Web, the DataSphere was also a chance for our tech team to try some new things that would make the data visible to search engines and accessible to as many users as possible. Whether we succeeded or not in that regard will be borne out through traffic data and other measures that we track on a regular basis.
Given that this was new ground for our tech team and the Web site in general, I wanted to pass on some lessons learned and reasons why we developed DataSphere in a particular way. Before delving in the geeky tech talk (stop reading now if this stuff makes your head spin), I should give some background on how roanoke.com appears on your screen.
