Directly joining a fishing forum and attempting to drive traffic away from it to your own blog seems a little shady. I know I would not want it done to me. (I did join a few newspaper sites and link back to roundvalleyfishing.com though)

Instead I have google alerts set up for every possible scenario concerning my niche and depending on the story i either link to it, comment in it or blog about it. I do leave comments in my local paper comments sections too but i really don’t see any value in it as far as the analytics data shows. I do join facebook groups and participate there, so this is the new “forum” for 2011.

I do have my own forum but it sees little activity. Facebook has killed the forum model for newer publications.

I believe this day 9 suggestion was more relevant pre facebook and google+ where sharing and filters were harder.

Google’s new enhanced business listings, which it started to test quietly in Houston and San Jose, Calif., early this month, have an obvious competitor: the Yellow Pages. -read the entire post at NYTimes.com

Here is the link to Google Map’s Enhanced Listing page (the yellow tag option is probably not available in your area yet though.

It remains to be seen if it works for Google.  Here’s how Google explains the site:

“Google Fast Flip is a web application that lets users discover and share news articles. It combines qualities of print and the Web, with the ability to “flip” through pages online as quickly as flipping through a magazine. It also enables users to follow friends and topics, discover new content and create their own custom magazines around searches.”

…they need to redo the video.  Why?  Because right as the following is being said, “…instead of spitting out search results by popularity we break them into logical categories and bring the best match to the top… and show related searches right there in the results page”  The picture below is being shown.

See that?  In the search history.  Colbert Report… what the hell does that have to do with anything? Nothing!  It’s distracting.  The running search example in the video is Home Depot, so colbert?  Take it out!  I’m still looking forward to seeing how Bing will actually work though.  Will it help me realize self actualization? It better because that is how high the bar is set.

UPDATE:

Bing is now up and running.  I did a simple search comparison for “NJ Boater Safety Course”  on Google and Bing and Bing came out on top.  It came back with the most relevant sites.

Google – Results 1 – 10 of about 1,130,000 for nj boater safety course. (0.17 seconds)

Bing – 1-10 of 80,500 results

If you live in an EveryBlock city and have an iPhone you can now have more news access than you ever thought you needed.  The app is available for free at the App Store.

Here’s how Everyblock explains the features of the app:  The EveryBlock iPhone app lets you explore news that’s happened recently in your immediate area.  We publish dozens of different categories of local news, drawing from hundreds of sources. Much of it is updated every single day. Examples of the information we publish:

• Business licenses (new businesses in your neighborhood)
• Crime
• Fire alerts
• Foreclosures
• Local deals / coupons
• Locations in the media (places in your neighborhood that have been mentioned in the news and in blogs)
• Real estate listings
• Restaurant inspection results
• Get recent health inspection reports for restaurants nearby
• See which crimes have been reported on the street you’re walking down
• Find out what places in your neighborhood have been covered in the news
• Get a sense for property values in your area

Google Maps is becoming more and more powerful by the day as users learn how to manipulate the powerful mapping software.  Listing your business for free with Google Maps is a simple no brainer, Must-Do for business owners. That’s free advertising,  sorry newspapers.  And now Google maps are being used with increasing regularity as powerful news visualization tools.  Below is a dynamic Swine Flu map created by a computer scientist from the UK and helped by contributions from 45+ others around the world.  The data used is timely and cited, leaving little to no room to question the accuracy and veracity of the map’s utility.

View 2009 H1N1 Flu Outbreak Map in a larger map

What does this mean for established news media?

• It means that 17million people now have a free source of local news.  Don’t think they will use it?  The app store has recorded over 800Million Downloads!
• It means that in the 6 days since the swine flu map was created it has been viewed over 1,350,000 times.
• It means that influential people like Warren Buffett Wouldn’t Buy a Newspaper At Any Price!

Sharon Waxman who writes Waxword for the Wrap… ugh, we get it we get it, has an interesting interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt who reveals that in about 6 months Google will launch a premium ad service for “premium content”.  The pilot news outlets to get this treatment will be the NYtimes and WashingtonPost.

The participating news outlets won’t get direct revenue bumps but the theory is that they will enjoy greater traffic from search.

In my opinion and Google’s too, websites need to figure out a way to better connect with their audience to create a community and lessen the reliance on search for revenue generation.

Today Topix announced that Topix becomes #1 news site of Gannett, Tribune & McClatchy Internet Portfolio -from Topix blog.  I have a few problems with this:

1. This sounds like a made up category,  ie. Metaprinter is the #1 news site of the Metaprinter Inc. portfolio!
2. Topix is ranked #32 in the news category on Alexa.
3. Compete doesn’t show Topix beating USAToday as stated in the above article.

4. I don’t know anyone who uses or likes Topix.  In fact, reading through the comments at the above post, it seems most people suspect the site is full of flame wars, trolls and hate speak.
5. For their size, Topix does not have a vibrant hyperlocal online community.
6. Where are the local advertisers?

I’ve contacted them for an interview.  We’ll see if they can clear some things up.

UPDATE:

An anonymous tipster has revealed to me that some news sites use Topix for their article comments section.   See for example this Gannett owned news site: citizen-times.com

Note the ‘comment on Topix forums’ option directly below the social bookmarking tools in addition to the Pluck Sitelife comments option at the end of the article.
“If you choose the Topix comment option, and enough discussion is generated on topix, it presumably bubbles up the story on Topix and the inbound links to the news site generate page views and more discussion”.

A little more digging on my part revealed that Tribune is using Topix.net to link to “Related News From the Web” as here below the Google Ads box in the body on their Baltimore Sun site.  The purpose here again is to increase pageviews and links.  It seems that Topix is nothing more than a solution for member newspapers to game the system and/or get more Google Juice.

Let me help you with that, Rupert. I’m going to save you all those potential legal fees plus needing to even speak further about the evil of the Big G with two simple lines. Get your tech person to change your robots.txt file to say this:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Done. Do that, you’re outta Google. All your pages will be removed, and you needn’t worry about Google listing the Wall St. Journal at all.

For more on this:

User-agent: *
The asterisk (*) or wildcard represents a special value and means any robot.

Disallow:
The Disallow: line without a / (forward slash) tells the robots that they can index the entire site.

I’m pretty sure the newspaper publishers are not going after Yahoo’s bigger-than-Google News platform because most of them are in the Yahoo Newspaper Consortium.

The Newspaper Consortium is comprised of 30 companies that represent nearly 800 local papers—a number that’s equivalent to 32 percent of all U.S. daily circulation and 41% of all U.S. Sunday circulation.

This map and project was inspired by Metaprinter — let Erica know if you have an idea for a project.

How did this turn into a project?

Metaprinter reader Eric Cox director of national sales for PNG Laboratories LLC was looking for a list of related information.  I started the list, then started a google maps mashup, realized it would look and act much like the one Erica Smith already has on her papercuts blog.  I contacted her about collaborating on the project and she was all for it!

The result is a dynamic map which will provide information about newspapers who have switched to online only publication. Hover over the markers to find detailed info about the newspaper.