Category — websites

Some three hours after the Cavs beat the Pistons and cavs.com writer The Optimist is predicting that the Cavs will win Monday night. Bravo.

Now, it’s not The Optimist’s fault that his words are a bit out of date, but it might be the fact that cavs.com relies on a flash-based story rotator. One that probably requires a bit of input to change — input that might be hard to come by at 10 p.m. just after a Cavs victory.

Notice how the ad next to Rasheed’s surprised face is up-to-date, selling tickets to the Cavs’ next home game Friday.

As with most things web — sales content management leads content management.

On a positive note, I have been very impressed with NBA.com’s streaming video this postseason. As they did throughout the season, they quickly post free video recaps of games, like this NBA TV highlight reel available shortly after the Cavs evened the series against the Pistons 2-2 Monday night.

Ted Strickland’s MySpace profile was mentioned on Channel 3 News tonight.

Earlier: Ted Strickland wants to be your friend, on MySpace (And yes, I work at Channel 3)

Ted Strickland on MySpace
Thanks to MySpace, I know he’s a Leo. Sorry ladies, this straight Democrat is married. Will Ohio and Ted be BFF? IMHO, yes.

tidor noticed Ted’s MySpace profile long before I did.

Sadly, voters can’t be virtual friends with Ken Blackwell, Frank Jackson, or even Capri Cafaro for that matter. Don’t these politicians need to reach young voters? Although, I’m really not sure how many voters he’ll turn on with such inspiring slogans as “Things can get better.”

Apparently, Ted is just following in the footsteps of Californian candidates: The SanFran Chronicle talks about the trend

URLFAN is a quick way to see what bloggers and web sites are linking back to your own site.

Much like alexa.com, URLFAN is one way to judge how effective your online presence is. In many ways, having a good number of blogs linking back to your site shows just how the most engaged online users — bloggers — feel about your site.

Here’s a rundown of a few Cleveland-area media sites, ranked by popularity on URLFAN as of April 4, 2006:

1. ohio.com — mentioned in 141 feeds, ranked 561 out of 1,230,303 sites
2. cleveland.com — mentioned in 97 feeds, ranked 839
3. newsnet5.com — mentioned in 45 feeds, ranked 2351
4. wkyc.com — mentioned in 22 feeds, ranked 5627
5. wcpn.com — mentioned in 3 feeds, ranked 29793
6. fox8cleveland.com, woio.com and wtam.com were not ranked.

Here’s a list of their top 100 ranked sites

Unlike technorati.com, URLFAN is a different way of presenting the information on blogs — concerned more with ranking sites rather than showing recent blog activity about a site.

As the power of remixing web sites continues to grow (through blogs, mash-ups and community sites), tracking just how often bloggers refer to your site will become an important metric for sites.

USAToday.com has redesigned their content pages. (Business, Sports examples.)

The look is much cleaner than the old design, which used a vertical, color-coded navigation that was scrunched into the upper left side of the page.

You can still see elements of the old look on their section front pages. (Business section example)

Coding wise, they’re still using tables, but the pages are lighter than before. Nice work.

Also, I just noticed their on deadline blog, which appears to be a constantly-updated list of the latest news of interest to USAToday editors — including links to other sites.

I’ve been using netvibes.com for about four months and I can’t see browsing the Internet without its functionality.

It’s fast, easy to use and speeds up my web consumption dramatically.

For some reason, I can’t stomach using Yahoo’s feed reader and although I have more feeds loaded up in SharpReader, it’s far easier to just visit netvibes and catch up on the few sites that I really care about.

Thanks to TechCrunch for cluing me into netvibes. TechCruch’s ‘Companies I couldn’t live without.

feed on this, more of my rants on RSS feeds

podbop.org is a nifty way to sample artists coming to a town near you.

The site is already doing great in my book — it reminded me that the Electric Six are coming to Cleveland soon.

For many old school media companies, using sites like MySpace and Flickr seems like a step in the right direction — moving away from one-way communication towards accepting the fact that people demand a conversation.

Umair likes to write about Edge competencies. There isn’t a mainstream media company that has edge competencies (”leverage cheap coordination strategically”), but here are a few creative examples of companies stretching to engage audiences in new ways:

• NBC: Using Google Video for Olympic clips
• Local TV stations, like WZZM using MySpace and Xanga
• The Cleveland Memory Project taps into Flickr’s online photo mindshare by offering several photos that link through to their main site

These companies are reaching for the edge but time will tell if they truly reach out and create user-generated conversations, such as the ones that can be found on newsvine and fark.com.

A new web site looks like a winner for getting new customers to place cable advertising. spotrunner.com offers off-the-shelf advertising and campaign scheduling via their website.

They claim to offer national coverage, and the three demo ads they have online are pretty smart for generic ads.

I don’t know why this couldn’t be recreated on a local scale by a broadcaster, ad agency or cable network, however.

I like the fact that it is automated and online — which could make it a success for a small business searching for a revenue boost at 3 a.m. (or 7:15 p.m., for that matter). via paidcontent.org