Rob Paterson's blog has a fascinating post about a St Louis public TV station apparently getting to grips with the role of old media in the world of new media. KETC’s H1N1 Blog - FluPortal.org

When the mortgage crisis began, KETC experimented with blogging as “a way to get information out to the community” during critical situations, Berenc said. The station’s mortgage-crisis blog (which is still up and running) “proved highly successful,” she told me. It generated lots of audience comments and drove traffic to KETC’s site.

So when swine flu emerged, Berenc said it was a no-brainer to create another blog “as part of an overall strategy to connect people to information on-air, online, and in the community.” To get started, KETC “convened a group of community organizations that have a stake in H1N1,” she explained, to solicit advice on “how to connect people to trusted resources.” The group included people from the city and county health departments, regional school districts, the United Way of Greater St. Louis, and the American Red Cross, St. Louis Area Chapter. Using their input, the station created a Wordpress site and started a group blog. KETC’s web coordinator vets posts written by staff, interns, and the Red Cross.

Although KETC doesn’t have stats yet on the success of the H1N1 blog, Berenc assured me that the station will continue it until H1N1 is no longer an issue. She believes the H1N1 page as a whole is “a prime example of what happens when public media organizations collaborate with trusted partners — the community wins.”

At the EYC conference in Wellington last month we had a couple of questions about how expert or authentic organisations working in specific social areas could be sure that the community is getting good information rather that being hijacked through Twitter or Facebook into donating to either outright scams or well-meaning, but inappropriate or ineffective actions.

This might be the answer. Of course, it will mean that your local media people wake up to their role online, which may take a while yet.

How effective are your local media in

1. using online technologies to improve the quality of information they publish and
2. using your expoert and informed resources to do that?

Comments open.

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Tucows has been around the net a lot longer than I have so when they come up with something new, I'm always open to trying it out. The latest is Butterscotch which claims to be a "fresh, friendly, smart and sticky portal into the world of technology".

We help you do more with the tech you already own and turn you on to the latest and greatest in language everyone can understand. We promise not to talk down to you and to only talk up the most interesting and impactful software, trends, news, gadgets and gear if you promise to come back often. Have a look around and see what sticks!

I had a look round and they cover a good range of tech stuff for us bunnies, a lot of basic knowledge like what is a dual processor or how does a VPN (virtual private network) work and series on working with Twitter, Google Chrome and other specific tools.

They also have a "Breaking news" series that provide tutorials on new tools that become available such as:

• Post LinkedIn updates to Twitter and vice-versa.
• Free Kindle software for your PC
• Google Dashboard gives you control over your privacy and data
• Twitter Lists let you follow groups
• Google Sync upgraded to provide push email
  Facebook launches lite version

I've tried a few and they aren't bad, still uses too much tech language for some, its surprising how much techies take for granted as stuff that everyone knows, but the practical stuff is step by step video and worth trying.

If you give it a go, let me know in the comments how it works out and how you rate it.

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We don't ride in horse buggies any more, we don't use hurricane lamps to light our kids homework and nobody appears to find that a problem, but for some reason a new technology like the Internet or txt messaging creates all kinds of moral panic and dark warnings that we are on the glide-path to hell unless we revert to our previous behaviours of, well, being couch potatoes.

Fortunately, we are collectively not only smarter than that, we are vastly more adaptable than we are given credit for by the guardians of the status quo. Technology hasn't made us hermits: study [Read more →]

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According to Mark Milian of the LA Times, Geocities was perhaps the first mainstream example of an open, participatory and personal Internet, its been there longer than I have been connected and, for years, any search of the web produced at least a couple of Geocities sites. It still attracts 10 million site visits a month but now, as Chris Crum writes, it is over. R.I.P. GeoCities: A Community is Killed

Yahoo has officially shut down Geocities.The company has said that it did not count the property among its priorities, so it is simply getting rid of it. Yahoo has shut down about 20 services in less than a year.

[...] Ok, so there are other options for GeoCities users, but is just shutting down a community that still attracts so much traffic the right thing to do? Yahoo's way of going about it has been widely questioned. According to Compete data, GeoCities has still been seeing over 10 million unique monthly visitors as recently as last month. Why would Yahoo want to just shut that down?

[...] It seems unwise from a business perspective, but what about the users? Does Yahoo have an obligation to its users who may have spent years using their GeoCities site only to have it pulled from the web? Should Yahoo provide a forwarding web address for GeoCities users?

MySpace isn't exactly at the peak of its popularity, but there are still tons of people who use it.

What if they just pulled everything? What if Google bought Facebook and decided to kill it? What if your Tweets vanished?

Sure these things seem unlikely now because these services are still fresh. Well, GeoCities was once the "it" thing too. Granted, most GeoCities sites I have seen are not much to look at now, but that doesn't mean people aren't getting use out of them. They're obviously getting page views.

OK, I accept that Yahoo! might have a commercial or operational reason for doing this, but shifting a site that may have been up for years, with all its files, is a huge job and not to offer some kind of simple migration to a blog for example is just bad PR.

Then there's the issue of millions of links to Geocities pages that will now vanish, again, an automated tool could set up forwarding to the new address for every page, but once Geocities closes, all that we'll have left is dead links.

This isn't the first such event, nor will it be the last, but as the internet ages, it will happen more often, hollowing out the whole system from the inside even as it grows at the edges. Yes, search engines will soon enough find those files that are transferred, but those that are not will mostly disappear, to be found only in google's cache if you really want it or in the wayback machine.

As the net becomes increasingly the memory of our collective mind, will it also be subject to an equally collective amnesia - or worse, Alzheimers?

Meanwhile, I'll continue to promote the many free tools available, from Facebook and Twitter to Ning, PBWorks, Flickr, YouTube, MyCommittee and so on.

Just remember that your rights under a free site are very limited and it can disappear tomorrow, don't keep irreplaceable material only where its free and preferably use tools that enable you to download the entire content to your hard drive in a single operation.

That may mean getting familiar with the old guys like FTP or finding tools with downloads using XML, but the moral will always be - backup!

What's your experience? Did you have a Geocities site? What free online services do you use and how do you rate them? In a pinch, how could you recover all the material you have posted there? Comments are open.

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We here, and many others, constantly push the value of online tools and resources for communicating with your stakeholders. But how do you know they are doing any good? For some ideas on how to measure that, PRWeb has a free online seminar that you, or your PR or comms people might like to check out.

If you’re still lugging a clip book around to demonstrate that your online news programs are successful, you might want to bring your strategy into the 21st century. With so many marketing channels available today – blogs, social media, SEO, and RSS feeds – you can’t continue to rely on measurement tools like press clippings.

Join guest speaker Greg Jarboe, president and co-founder of SEO-PR, for an hour long webinar on Measuring the Success of Your Online News Releases. Learn how you can:

* Use current analytics to measure your online news efforts
* Apply SEO results to improve your search rankings
* Measure the impact of your social media networks and blogs
* Build an effective PR plan and strategy using what you’ve learned

Event Date: October 21, 2009 2:00-3:00 PM EDT (New York)

Cost: This Webinar is FREE

I'm going to be tied up with a bunch of meetings over that time but a 7-8 am NZ time for it isn't too bad. if you decide to take it in, let me know how it goes.

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