State of Local

One of the challenges for anyone dealing with local news and the web is staying on top of the newest technologies and services. Yes, there is more on the web than just Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

Here’s a quick look at five sites you should be familiar with. Not so much because you’ll use them, but because they’re a good indication of what everyone will be talking about in six months.

Qik
http://www.qik.com
It’s still in Alpha, but Qik is a piece of software that enables users to stream video directly from their cellphones to the web. It’s possible to go live with a stream from anywhere you can find a solid cellphone connection, and Qik makes it easy to integrate the streams with Twitter. The live streams are also automatically recorded for later use.

I can see a lot of uses for this on a local news site. It would allow photographers an easy way to shoot some quick video from a breaking news situation directly to the internet. I’m just starting to play around with it, and while the quality isn’t always optimal, it’s a powerful tool for lean and mean news organizations.

Mogulus
http://www.mogulus
The site is still in closed Beta (although it’s not hard to get an invite). The site provides an easy way to stream video either through the Mogulus site or through an embedded video window that can stuck into any site.

The interesting fact of Mogulus is that their studio software allows multi-user collaboration. Video can be gathered from video sites such as YouTube, and video can also come from webcams and other sources.

Typeroom
http://www.typeroom.com
Blogging solutions like WordPress or Blogger are fine, but there are times when you want something that’s closer to traditional content management. There are a number of solutions already market-ready, but Typeroom is different because it’s a web-based content management system that allows users to edit existing sites on the fly.

The editing process is really straightforward. Users type in the URL of a page they want to edit and Typeroom then creates a copy of that page on their servers. That copy can be edited in a WYSIWYG environment before users download that edited page directly to their computer for upload back up into the site via FTP.

So why does this matter to you? We all have our own content management systems and they all have their own strengths and weaknesses. It’s important to see what other solutions are out there, and what your competitors might be using in the upcoming months.

Pubmatic
http://www.pubmatic.com
At its core, Pubmatic is ad optimization engine that works as a meta ad server. It offers up the highest revenue ad network for each visitor given the time, geographic, demographic, and layout of the site. It supports ad networks like Google AdSense, Yahoo Publisher Network and Value Click.

While this solution isn’t practical for a larger media company, this is a very useful idea for small to medium-sized publishers.

Haloscan
http://www.haloscan.com
There are a lot of ways to add commenting to a web site, but many of the best require a lot of expensive integration and tweaking. Haloscan offers up a way to easily add commenting and ratings to a blog or website, simply by adding a bit of code. It offers comment moderation, you can ban offensive commennters by a single IP or IP range, and there is even a recent comments widget.

Once again, this isn’t the best solution for a large publisher, but if you’re a smaller news site (or you’re simply building a smaller stand-alone site), this is a quick and easy solution to commenting, ratings and trackbacks.