"Total local stories per day 22,293
Number of populated US ZIP codes 32,500

We started by trying to add more sources. We added government, weather and industry sources, and then we added 25,000 blogs to the mix to see what we'd get. And, pretty much, they still didn't provide the breadth of coverage around local news, especially around small towns.

Don't like the news? Make some of your own!"

"It's going to take more than one company to rebuild the local newspaper from the ground up."

--VC Fred Wilson, writing about Adrian Holovaty's just launched hyperlocal aggregator and service, EveryBlock, and about his investment in Outside.In.

(Susan sez: This is a Knight News Challenge grant project and it's exciting to see how it's refining ideas from Craigslist, Topix and others.)

"Even though we were seeing eye-to-eye on what needed to be done, after the press tour and some initial conversation about where we needed to go, Rich told me that he wasn't having as much fun right now, and looking at what we needed to do, didn't see much opportunity for what he really loves to do -- architect from the metal on up and put out the 1.0 that is so far ahead of everything else - the first computer virus, one of the first MUD's, NewHoo/dmoz, Topix - that even his no good co-founders couldn't screw things up."

And

"Strap in, it's going to be fun."

--New topix CEO Chris Tolles, explaining co-founder and now ex-CEO Rich Skrenta's decision to move up to the board and put Chris in charge.

(Susan sez: Full disclosure is I am friends with these guys from waay back, so this is a totally biased post.)

My friend Rich Skrenta has a typically cogent post up, only this time it's not about the Google OS, it's about the me-too and I don't wanna be left out network effects of digerati flocking to Facebook. In particular, Rich notes how the switching cost is pretty low for most SN services.

Some quotes:
"In an environment where travel is free and instantaneous, you get flash mobs.
If a place is cool, or new, or interesting, you go there to check it out.
A place might be interesting simply because there are a lot of other people there at the moment. "

and

"It's easier than ever to move from one service to another. Blog reader? No problem. Photo site? I have accounts on all of them anyway. Social networks? Yeah I'm signed up on all of them. I use the ones everyone else is using, at the moment. Just like we all do. The rest have a stub profile for me, but don't see much activity."

Susan sez:
The portal play was to embed all your apps and tools in one place as a way to hold you there(think AOL on the web).
The social network play was to have you collect all your connections to hold you there (think LinkedIn.)
The widgety-goodness way (I just can't write Web 2.0 one more time!) is to try to get the users to aggregate their tools, services, and connections in one place (think Facebook today).

That's all cool but the other thing web businesses need to think about, besides widgets, is the identity issue--the services that can figure out aggregating tools and services --like Facebook is--will grow, but the ones that can also figure out identity management--as in multiple identities and layers of privacy--can leap ahead.

Just came from the Rich Skrenta/ Gabe Rivera/Ted Shelton/Oliver Muoto panel, moderated by Charlene Li at the web 2.0 expo on the topic of Media 2.0 and emerging technologies, revenue models and audiences.
Notes and comments from that session follow:

The alt title of this panel might be geeks who love media and the question of the day is “where is next generation aggregation and media going?”

Rich's spiel is that folks don't appreciate the newspapers subsidize the 4th estate more efficiently than blogging, even as the Net siphons business and readers from print.

Ted Shelton (Personal Bee/Technorati) says that is view of media 2.0 is that whole new range of people are going to star thinking of themselves as publishers a and as content aggregators and or curators—the best things for the right audience at the right monument.

(Susan sez: This is personalization isn't it?)

• Everyone agrees that one big shiny brass ring is to do the best job of filtering UGC and pro content and giving people what they want in a smart roll up.
• In other words, delivering that content to people within roll ups and aggregators
• And personalizing or delivering the right content to the right people
• And working out the revenue model and the costs.

Some discussion: Muoto Google is considered the 800 lb gorilla, but small businesses have a lot of problems with ad words and ad sense—they are too complicated to use and keywords can be too expensive. There is room for improvement—not everyone is online buying advertising.

Shelton: How do we help brand advertisers take advantage of the Internet? Google does not (yet), addressed this.

Charlene asks Gabe and Rich: How did you build your audience?
Rich highlights how advertisers want small zip code segments and how that problem isn't solved—yet.

Gabe says that TechMeme is about the links—the relationships—and growth has been driven by experiencing useful links as part of a larger web.

Ted Shelton (relentlessly plugging Technorati (already!) points out Technocrat's virtuous circle of tools and content roll ups—but also adds that his new employer got into this early and it is HARD to get traction in the audience—or to get customers.

Muoto says the novelty effect is great, but too limited. “It is easier for people who are stars to rise to the top and get recognition.” (Susan sez: What does that mean?)

Charlene: Innovation comes from unique perspectives, early in the space. The big players may not have the speed or even the capability. What do bigcos need to do differently?

Skrenta: For big cos to be nimble it's much more difficult to get things done. Having said that, Yahoo, in particular, has some very interesting businesses inside of it like Yahoo! Local and Yahoo! Groups—this is old stuff but it's a compelling opportunity for local community—but if you can't unify groups and message boards into the local services how can you move quickly enough to win?

Shelton says innovation is about big cos doing innovation but big companies can stifle smaller ones (he cites Caterina Fake's example of her niece squeezing her pet hamster to death from an excess of love).

There's more discussion about reaching audiences—Rich affirms that Google search is everyone's start page; Gabe reminds us that many of the tech driven Media 2.0 start ups don't have a persistent, lasting value—the founders were “too in love with the technology.”
Muoto says audience development is the most important problem facing small web businesses.”

Shelton: The mobile internet is going to put the final nail in the coffin of media. Ubiquitous mobile devices will finish off newspapers.

The talk continues for the alotted hour, but the (large and diverse) audience seems sluggish; interested in business models and specific tips more that high level issues, I suspect.

Alex Iskold has a piece at Read/Write Web that explores Technorati as a tool for measuring popularity in the blogosphere and then describes what's popular right now by analyzing the top 50 blogs listed by Technorati.

Reading Alex's piece, which Richard edited, so many off the mark assumptions leapt out at me, I needed to write this post.

According to Alex, "Tech is the number one focus of popular blogs. Politics is second and pop culture third, which clearly gets a lot of attention both off line and online."

That's all fine, but I'd suggest that this is only the case because we're not in the middle of an election race--and that the minute the Presidential elections--or any other hotly contested political battle-kick in, these stats will flip, big time.

Furthermore, looking at the top blogs misses the singular impact of the long tail and the aggregate value of networks.

While it's true that that highest common dominator as described by Technorati stats is political, tech/consumer tech and pop culture blogs, I'd argue there's a significant readship and interest in parenting blogs(mommy blogs in particular), gossip blogs (does pop culture cover that?), erotica and sex blogs, and DIY, crafting and design blogs that Technorati stats--somehow so persistently squewed toward what geeks read--consistently fail to account for.

I bet that if you could compare Technorati stats with Topix and Feedburner stats, for example, you'd get a very different picture of the sum total of what was popular in the blogosphere--and it would be a more accurate view.

(Susan sez: I understand Technorati is measuring links to blogs to derive the top 100, my point is that there are other, more accurate measures writers like Alex should take into consideration--or, put another way, generalizations can be inaccurate.

Interestingly, when I run a search for Mommy blogs on Technorati, I get 388 results back as blog posts, but when I run the same search on Google BlogSearch I get 271,743 results for mommy blogs--Now, I realize that neither one of these is counting very accurately, but it's a heads up.

And when I typed in politics blogs on Google BlogSearch, there were 221,295 results (for posts) compared to Technorati's total of 24,582--the point being, even as I acknowledge the different ways that Technorati and Google Blogsearch compute and present their totals, that Technorati is no longer be presenting the most complete and accurate picture of behavior in the blogosphere--and hasn't been for a while.)

So Alex's piece is an interesting exercise in deconstructing Technorati stats--but not the bellweather for blogosphere topics, readers, or even what's truly popular beyond the eternal top ten --or in this case top 50--list.

I'd value seeing Richard follow up with another analysis of what people are actually reading and writing in the blogosphere across a broader range of categories and then work backwards to tell us what analytical tools are most clearly measuring that behavior--how about it--a true look at where readers--and writers--are putting effort beyond the greatest common denominators.

"...the hopes that Dan Gillmor raised for the media industry in his book -- which kicked off this whole business -- have largely failed."

--Rich Skrenta, Topix CEO, writing in his blog about what he describes as the * failure* of the We Media conference in Miami this past week on the basis that the *new* online news paradigms have not succeeded in the business world--and that, in fact, participatory media is, by very definition, uncommercial.

Rich also says (in that admirably blunt, Skrenta way): "The dog's breakfast of new media startups includes Gather, Backfence, Newstrust, Daylife, TailRank, Associated Content, Pegasus News, Tinfinger, Findory, Inform, Newsvine, Memeorandum, NowPublic. ....And yes, I would include Topix here as well. ....But, we can face it, even we haven't yet burned down the world, or upended the news industry."

Susan says: I don't personally believe that participatory journalism is, by definition, non-commercial--I just think the business rules will continue to shift, in ways we can't yet see (where are those great micropayments systems everyone wanted for bloggers a few years ago--are publishing networks the 2007 equivalent?)

But Rich's comments always capture my attention--as does this bonus quote from Mark Glaser:
"Thanks to the audience taking control of their media experience and creating their own media in blogs, podcasts, video and social networks, the people who are losing control have decided to meet — and meet, and meet again — until they figure out how they can take back some control of this uncontrollable situation. "

If I could have taken the time off from work, I would have gone to this conference--and formed my own opinion--but meanwhile, am still digesting what looks like a lot of blogosphere negative comments--and wondering how many layers and levels of Old Guard/New Guard came into play at this event.

Polite disclosure: I was a fellow of an earlier version of ifocus, and know lots of the people in this discussion...and am fascinated both by the criticisms of the conference and Rich's higher-order observations (and wondering how they fit together.)

It was great to see all the links and write-ups that Lisa William's Placeblogger received; there was one aspect of the service that I'm very interested in that I didn't have a chance to get into in my earlier post, that I want to talk about now, and that is the open source, structured directory aspect of the service.
In an interview with ClickZ for a story about the service, I said: "I would like to see Placeblogger become the geographical equivalent of something that was powerful early on; the open directory, the first peer-edited, user generated directory for search. DMOZ became the semantic structure for all the search structures that Yahoo and Google used, and it was open source. Placeblogger has an opportunity to become an open source user generated directory of local sites and services."
To expand on that idea, IMHO Placeblogger could evolve into a meta-directory of local sites with a series of regional advisors who funnel sites into the (highly structured) database, a dedicated core of Placebloggers who supply feeds and new links, an API that allows redistribution, mash-ups and new product development, a Creative Commons license that supports third-party--and commercial development--and the means to be one of the platform tools fuleing a new wave of local--and potentially self-service advertising platforms, targeted right down to the zip code.
It's no accident that Topix.net, one of my very favorite locally-focused search/display products, was co-founded by folks who were part of the Open Directory team, but now, as a privately owned service, Topix has their own plans for world domination--or at least, product excellence, that do not (to my kmowledge) focus on platforms and open source.
My hope is that Placeblogger, in its own (admittedly) smaller and more hand-crafted way, can take some lessons from the Open Directory and become the core resource for blogs and other data sources with very specific local identities, affinites, and services. (And just think of how such a service can fit with yellow pages and other enhanced directories, especially when you factor in the community services....)

My friend Lisa Williams is about to launch Placeblogger, an OPML-based aggregator that will be a directory of local blogs--blogs focused on a place, not neccessarily news blogs--around the country.
Now Steve Berlin Johnson, one of the more reflective writers I read, announces that's he's got a stealth local start-up called outside.in--a service that aggregates local news, blogs and other feeds into one handy-dandy destination page (a fulsome example is at 11217--Park Slope, Brooklyn, where Johnson lives)--Palo Alto seems a little, uh bare right now).
Like Backfence, the too-early Bayosphere, and dozens of local news-focused sites like BaristaNet (Montclair, NJ), outside.in will try to generate value for a local community and serve as the starting point and destination.

The difference between outside.in and some of these earlier sites, however, is that rather than serve as a place to create and post content (think stable of writers model) these new sites use feeds, tagging and GEO-URL to create a service that can aggregate and therefore serve as the epicenter of local user generated content--in other words, something more similar to what Topix has been tryng to do with its local local content (see Palo Alto in their planet here and Park Slope here).

Susan sez: It energizes me to see efforts to get local *right* come round and round again as the tools and users evolve. Back in the early mid to late 90s, we did New Jersey Online, a local site with news, forums, and personality, then truly local sites like BaristaNet popped up in the 00s and newspapers improved their skin in the game, and then we got into the citizen journalism thing big time and lots of efforts faltered a bit as others worked--and now here's the latest placeblogging incarnation starting to develop and it is going to be very interesting.

Susan sez 2: The ever-more techy site of me has to point out the intense value of companies like Yahoo supporting their efforts through a rich series of APIs. One obvious implication of these aggregator sites is that the do ride on tools--and APIs- developed by others, so the importance of haing local APIs and making them available to people working at this level is critical. (Imagine if say a big web FooBar business decided to have a rich API and offer it to placebloggers and the placebloggers all created local APIs driving back to that business and just think how much that business might gain in distribution and referral if all these emerging hyperlocal bloggers picked the feed up...and...you get the drill.)

And then of course there is the business woman part of me which is constantly interested in how to support local, targeted advertising--the sweet spot of all this growth.

So, the ever-shifting continuance of local and the rise of placeblogging are great--and may a thousand flowers--and many more placeblogs--flourish.

BONUS: Steve has some points about placeblogs worth repeating:
1. It's all about hyperlocal.
2. A post can be local, even if the blogger isn't (and therefore worth aggregating)
3. Neighborhoods are more important that maps.
4. Geo-tags and location-aware tags are good, but it's also important to have other filters-- date, for example.
5. Local news often has a long-shelf life.

Chris Tolles has a post today about Topix's recently outed free classifieds network,who empowers local users to post for sale items in the Topix network. The adss are free and featured on local news papers (they have 30,000 of those)--and they'remonetized by one of the best usages of Google Ad Words on the planet.

Chris says: "The key to making this work, as Jeff Jarvis rather tartly points out, is a lot of local traffic. With over 7M unique visitors, spread out pretty evenly geographically, we are getting great pickup. We're getting great traction on our forums -- 8,000 posts a day, with real diversity (not just the Web 2.0 crowd). The new Topix classified ad system is growing at a similar pace."

Susan says: As GoogleBase rolls on, other option become pretty interesting--not as ways to beat newspapers ( Craig did that), but as vast aggregated distributors of structued data AND tagged content. Put Technorati, edgeio and others into the soup and wonder who the next leader in combining structured data and free text tagging might be--and what kind of classifieds system triumph that could lead to.

The AP reports that The McClatchy Co. has reached a deal to buy Knight Ridder Inc for about $4.5 billion in cash and stock, the companies announced Monday. McClatchy will also assume about $2 billion in Knight Ridder's debt and plans to sell 12 of Knight Ridder's 32 newspapers, including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Philadelphia Daily News and the San Jose Mercury News.
I'm wondering what will happen to the digital assets-- ShopLocal, Topix and KRD corporate development--will they remain intact, be moved to Sacramento, or be broken apart?

So how does Rich assess CL vs paid dating listings, a la Y ! Personals and Match.com? Some snippets of his POV here:
"The personals column competes with Match.com, eHarmony, and other dating sites. But it's got something they don't. A riveting editorial column written by the users. "
And, as Rich points out, Craig has lots more links on his home page to personals categories.
(Susan says true, but as users know, the very randomness of CL dating often makes the results (i.e. people you meet) as surprising as the posts.)

Rich's final quote:
" ...who else attacks so many different businesses on a single hompage? Online dating, events, real estate, apartments, forums, used cars, community, jobs. OMG... Yahoo. "

Gotta love that Rich, how true is that? LOL.

The incomparably smart Rich Skrenta deconstructs Craiglist's succeess in a post that's a must-read for anyone interested in classifieds, citizen journalism, the semantic web and viral marketing/local. A snippet:
"Craig's lead-into-gold trick is that he gets his posters to accurately classify their spam. Into 160 categories. Holy Toledo Jacob Nielsen. You can't have a pulldown with 160 things in it. Half of your users wouldn't get a pulldown with 3 things in it right. Ah, but it's not a pull-down. Half of the entire homepage is a giant selector devoted to classifying posts.
Isnip)
Booting up new cities should be very hard, maybe taking years like the main SF site took. But there's another set of seed material to help new Craigslist cities get going. The discussion forums. These are global across all the Craigslist cities. If you go to perth.craigslist.com and click on 'transit', you're going to read about SF Muni. But fortunately many of the categories, like 'kink', travel well. So there is plenty of discussion on a brand new Craigslist city to look at even when nobody from the new town has contributed anything yet. "

As usual, Rich is sharp, incisive and original--folks, take note.

Topix's Rich Skrenta's got an outstanding post on citizen journalism, alogrithmic news, and media going on--a must read.
Some snippets:
"The quality of journalistic output today is, for the most part really really good. In fact it's too good. The product costs a huge amount to bring to market, and what the Internet enables is a an alternative product built for zero, and providing a different value proposition. Citizen journalism is going to be more Citizens and less Journalism. "
and
"Creating a local news page for every town in the US provided us with a set of local audiences for thousands of towns... towns where people who use AOL and have never heard of Web 2.0 live. These people want to tell their stories too. You don't need to know what a blog is to want to tell your story online, and you don't need a journalist to tell you how either, it turns out.
We've been astonished at many of the posts we've had. There is much of the normal chatter you'd find on message board comments (which we think is just great), but there are also many first-person accounts of news events from across the country. More than we expected, frankly. In places like Valley Center, CA, Hickory, NC, Redford, MI, Hillborough, NC, Lake Butler, FL, Hershey, PA, and Livermore, CA. Some of these reports are very raw and heart-wrenching. But we're glad we were able to offer a place for these conversations to occur. "

Susan sez: Rich is a ground-breaker, and this is something important to watch.,and participate in.

"Blogs and news are now on equal footing on Topix.net," says Topix CEO Rich Skrenta, who reports that Topix has added 15,000 blogs to its index, and offers an inside look at a question that intrigues the Topix guys: "Are blog posts news?"
To figure that out, Rich and co. took a look at the coverage of key categories--news, sports, entertainment, etc.--but mainstream media and blogs, decided blogs added a lot to the mix, and then crawled (he says) about 1 MM blogs to build a list of the 15,000 now incorporated into the Topix index. He's got some interesting charts and some fascinating data, including the fact that 85-90% of the daily posts hitting ping services such as weblogs.com are spam--and now visitors to pages like US News and Wierd News can see the blog posts highlighted alongside the other feeds.

Paid Content: "While the unique audience of AOL News is about 29% smaller than Yahoo News, AOL News is more than 2.4 times larger than Google News and almost 6.8 times larger than Topix.net." Story here.

Greg Jarboe says this moves AOL news into the top ranks--but AOL News has always been huge--now it's getting bigger.

I know I should be amazingly cool and pretend that it didn't give me a total thrill to meet Google's Krishna Bharat, but that would be a lie. Meeting Krishna and chatting with him will definitely be one of the high points of the trip (another might be sitting cross-legged in the Korean Folk Village eating kim chee and ribs with Rich Skrenta and his wife--nothing like travelling 6,000 miles to dine with your neighbor from California).
Anyway, Bharat is smart, refreshingly low-key and very passionate about Google News and the service's committment to provide multiple viewpoints on an event via story clusters.

Chatting, Skrenta asked Bharat if they had any plans to index more video. Bharat said no, but pointed out that Google News is indexing some podcasts (?)--or at least the text transcripts that link to podcasts (think NPR). Currently based in Bangalore, Bharat still oversees Google News, but has also been hiring for a small Google engineering office in Bangalore.

Had lunch last week with Topix guys Rich Skrenta and Chris Tolles at their beautiful Palo Alto offices (like, above the trophy shop). The conversation ranged from work focus post-acquisition to the legal issues around packaging up feeds.
For those who are interested in learning more about this very nimble company, some info from the talk:

• Topix.net is an active packager and redistributors of local content and news feeds, as well as a growing force in providing aggregated local news.
• Topix has 150,000 topically based, micro-news pages and more than 2.8 MM unique users.
• There are roughly 187,000 My Yahoo subscribers, 190,000 CitySearch subscribers, and 7,000 Bloglines subscribers reading their feeds.
• More than 10,000 sources are spidered--to acquire and categorize the data, Topix spiders, aka indexes, sites on an indexing list and leaves behind aTopix.net URL in the log files that shows the site was crawled.
• The robot spider is blockable if source wishes. If access is given, takes headlines and digest.
• A URL is left behind showing the spider was there. The spider can be blocked with a simple command.
• Over past 15 month of operations, only 4 sources have opted out.

• 2,000 content entities have contacted Topix and requested inclusion in the crawl list.
• Commercial distribution arrangements are in place with AOL, Ask Jeeves and Infospace, bundling headlines and digests of content and supplying them out.

So Topix's Rich Skrenta read my post and came up with some fascinating data of his own re topix and bloglines, including the fact that "Topix.net has 187k subs total on My Yahoo, compared with 7k on Bloglines."
Rich also says "Our knitting feed is our 12th most popular feed; quilting is #10."
List of all topix feeds is here.

Susan says: Larger implications of feed packaging and redistribution continue to be interesting...both from an ad perspective (think of the revenue these feeds could carry and who gets the $$) and from a licensing/permissions perspective...either way, Rich, this is so interesting.

Dave Weinberger says: Confusability is scraping bloglines and noticing how people are categorizing feeds. Among the first 100 most popular folder names on Bloglines are:

• blogs
• news
• tech
• Technology
• People
• Politics
• friends
• comics
• blog misc

Among the Bloglines feed consumers that I recognized are scobelizer(1085), Phil Wolff (813), George Kelly (764), Enoch Choi(759) and A ndrew Nachison (712).
Someone has a list of 3,000+ blogspot feeds.

Q: When is an embargo not an embargo?
A: When a major news organization breaks it, cause they can.
Tom Biro gets down and dirty into the Topix.net story, the news embargo and the practice of--well--keeping agreed-upon secrets.
If embargoes matter to you, this is an interesting write-up.
If not--well, go have some coffee.

Jeff Clavier fisks the Topix numbers and comes up with some theories. He writes :"There are enough whispers of the return of a bubble in the RSS/new media world to try and figure out whether this was a $5M or a $50M deal (see, I am not the only one wondering). And then quotes Bambi Francisco saying that Topic was valued between $50 and $100 million. Jeff writes:
"So we have confirmation that a large part of the consideration went to the shareholders of the company - allowing them to partially cash out, and a small portion went to the bank as operating cashflow. Great deal (somewhat similar to the MySpace financing where the original owner partially cashed out, and the co got some cash). Back to the original feeling of delight for these guys, etc.

However the valuation seems... rich."

I spoke with someone last night who has another emerging tech company who was thrilled about this deal...it makes his company, like the others on Rafat Ali's best bets for buyouts list, seem all the more valuable.

CEO Skrenta lays the deal out.
PR rep Rubel weighs in, along with Malik, Battelle, Hammock, Ali, and Jarvis.

Update: Bambi Francisco, Marketwatch: "Topix.net would not disclose the terms of the deal, only to say that the funding was less than $5 million. The capital will be used by the nine-person team, partly to give a salary to the founders, who hadn't paid themselves in three years."

Clarification: Valuation for Topix.net is rumored to be way higher than Bloglines. If the $$ rumors are right, the founders should be feeling pretty, pretty good.

Earlier today, Tony Gentile had a rumor that Topix.net was acquired by Knight-Ridder--it's true.
Knight Ridder, in partnership with the Tribune Media Company and Gannett, has acquired 75% of Topix.net for an undisclosed amount.
I spoke with Rich Skrenta, Topix CEO and founder, and he told me that the deal would allow Topix to remain as an independent entity based in the Valley--and deploy their skills across the KRD-Trib-Gannett platform.
The press release states: "Topix.net will use content and funding from Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune to expand and refine its NewsRank technology, services and operational infrastructure. ..Collectively, Gannett, Knight Ridder and Tribune operate more than 140 newspaper Web sites with nearly 30 million unique visitors monthly. The companies have partnered together in other joint ventures such as ShopLocal.com and CareerBuilder.com."

This is an awesome event for the (self-funded) Topix guys, and an amazingly shrewd move by these newspaper partners--for far less than the NYTimes, they've acquired a resource that will help them launch and create local feeds, monetize text ads far better than Google AdWords can off the shelf, and help make them a leader in the search, local and RSS spaces.
The deal also plays well with Knight-Ridder's recent acquisition of 5 local daily newspapers in Silicon Valley, including the Palo Alto Daily News. If Topix.net's talent is to aggregate and categorize local feeds, then these newspapers are both prime content for Topix and a potential platform for a new targeted local business--not a bad plan. And if KRD and partners are willing to take a run at adding citizen journalism--watch out!

So folks, maybe old media ain't so old anymore.

P.S. Plus, this is disruptive to the other companies (and there are many) pitching their search and RSS services to newspaper partners, who now see 3 of the big ones locked up...and to the big aggregators who now find online news business are alive and kicking still.

The big annual newspaper industry conferences are this weekend -- Vin Crosbie explains why he won't be there and Pegasus News chimes in.
Meanwhile, there will be moblogging (RSS) from the IFRA newspaper techniques team, and a blog from The Digital Edge of the NAA for and by conference participants.
I read through the sessions and could not find anything about RSS, newsreaders, or social media.
Or Craigslist, Tribe or Bakotopia. Or hyperlocal citizen journalism.
Or local vertical search.

Parallel universe?

Via Emergic.org, a pay-attention post from Mark Lucovsky, former Microsoft distinguished operating system architect, now Google engineer, on what it means to ship software:
" I am not sure I believe anymore, that Microsoft 'knows how to ship software'. When a Microsoft engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? I know the answer and so do you... The software sits in a source code control system for a minimum of two years (significantly longer for some of the early Longhorn code)...(snip)..In many cases, particularly for users working in large corporations, they won't see the software for a year or more post RTM...

When an Amazon engineer fixes a minor defect, makes something faster or better, makes an API more functional and complete, how do they "ship" that software to me? What is the lag time between the engineer completing the work, and the software reaching its intended customers? A good friend of mine investigated a performance problem one morning, he saw an obvious defect and fixed it. His code was trivial, it was tested during the day, and rolled out that evening. By the next morning millions of users had benefited from his work."

In other words, speed of execution makes a huge difference in making a difference, and as Rich Skrenta so perceptively said, Google IS creating itself as a massive OS.

And now they've got the guy to do it.

Search Engine Blog talks to Topix.net founder Rich Skrenta. Rich emphasizes that Topix strives to automate editorial functions in categorizing stories.
Recognizing named entities challenges the machine first to be able to tell whether the story cites the movie star or the ordinary person with that name, and then to understand whether the story is actually about the person or just mentioning him or her in passing (this is a big flaw in Google news alerts.)
Rich also talks about dmoz, the open directory, and says that "while directories were very interesting in the mid '90's, keyword search has eclipsed them as the main ways consumers find information on the Internet."
And my favorite quote from Rich: "Search is a first step to full utilization of a world-sized corpus of encyclopedic information, combined with the full value that community participation in the content & commerce process can provide."

A good read.

Rich Skrenta reports that AOL Local will be use Topix.net headlines on their new local search service.
Susan sez: IMHO, Topix is a small company that is doing both the technology and the business right. Rock on, guys!

Hop Studios ( Travis Smith & Susannah Gardner) have redesigned 5 local LA-area newspaper web sites owned by Tribune via LATimes:

• Daily Pilot
• Burbank Leader
• Coastline Pilot
• Huntington Beach Independent
• Glendale News-Press

Nice.

From rojo's Kevin Burton:

PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) - Hoping to attract more online readers, The New York Times is paying to have its headlines featured in sections of Topix.net, an Internet startup that compiles news snippets from hundreds of Web sites.

The partnership, expected to be announced Thursday, represents a coup for Palo Alto-based Topix, which hopes to persuade other newspapers to buy featured positions it other sections of its Web site. Topix, founded in 2002, offers 150,000 different categories, divided by geography and a wide range of categories, including news, sports, entertainment, health and science.

Talk about deep verticals! It's interesting that the Times is moving beyond syndication deals with the big guys (AOL, etc.) to the long tail, which is what Topix.net represents.