Archive for April 26th, 2008

Last weekend we trucked down to Mount Vernon for the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival. It was beautiful, spectacular, wonderful and every other extraordinary adjective you can think of.

Today, we had our own little tulip festival in the backyard.

Last fall, Jen blistered up her hands trying to dig through a rocky, barren pit in a corner of our yard to fill it with yellow, white and red. These tulips have taken their time cracking through - what with the snow and ice and all. But today we were rewarded with explosions of colour normally saved for the Symphony of Fire / Celebration of Light.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?

… sort of…

One of the things I’m excited about is the way old media can use new technology to better serve their audiences. I’ve been critical of the way print does it in the past, I’ve celebrated the way television has moved to adapt, and today half-kudos to the print gang.

The New York Times, when it first came online, had a subscription model. You had to pay to get the content. It didnt work.

Vivian Schiller, Senior VP and General Manager of the NYTimes.com attributes a significant part of the increase to the end of the subscription model called Times Select. Fueling the growth, she also cites popular multimedia features, blogs and a successful search maximization strategy. Way ahead as destination for newspapers, Schiller says the paper is heading to compete with news portals and cable television sites. [source]

Recently they have opened up their entire paper to the internet and you can scan stories and archives for free. They’ve also taken the power of the web and used it to enhance their print content. Often you will see stories in the paper and then given a chance to watch or listen to complete interviews that were used to write the story. The paper also produces unique content you can only find on the web. The Times has grown beyond being a “newspaper” to becoming a full and complete multimedia company using all their resources to seed content online.

It’s a bold and brilliant step.

Other newspapers have seen the success and are making strides to do the same. The Vancouver Sun, for example, now has an RSS feed not only linking to stories, but giving you a rundown of the events of the day and other articles coming in the days ahead. The feed is impossible to find on their front page, so just type “vancouver sun” into Google Reader to get it.

They’ve also taken the leap of adding multimedia on their site, but you’ll have to do some work to find it. Here’s a direct cut and paste from today’s RSS Feed.

Today @ vancouversun.com
Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, April 26, 2008

Read Iain MacIntyre’s take on new Canucks GM Mike Gillis and hear excerpts from his interview under “Editor’s Picks.”

See a video and a narrated slide show of Sun writer Ian Walker’s botched bid to become a jockey.

Hear Christy Clark interview Landcor Data Corp.’s Rudy Nielsen about myths and realities in B.C.’s real estate market.

Hear Westcoast Homes editor Mike Sasges narrate a slide show on Morningstar Homes. [source]

Not one hyper link in the bunch. They simply took the text from the paper and put it in their template, nothing to make it web friendly at all. That’s the rub. I’m on the website and would like to see the slide show of Ian Walker. Instantly. Instead, I have to hunt and peck through the disastrous number of menus surrounding the page to find the link.

The Sun gets marks for trying. They’re just not quite there - yet.

The Blog According to Buzz. Spread the word, ya heard?