Posts Tagged ‘local’

I’ve never liked having to re-login to portals to get access to my setup and information again, like iGoogle and My Yahoo require. Of course Microsoft has live.com which used to be start.com. Even though iGoogle and My Yahoo will let you share a tab, it requires the other person to be logged in or requires cookies, plus the information won’t be there, it basically just gives them what modules you have without any of your settings.

However the following sites will let you share your page and then it makes it public to where anyone can see it. Good thing about this is that you can easily type in the URL (or bookmark it) and bring it up without having to login. Of course if you need to make changes then you’ll have to login, but its nice to be able to see a quick glimse of weather, stocks, events and other information that really doesn’t matter if its public or not.

• Pageflakes - Nice url for sharing your tab. Themes coming soon. They keep the options a little simpler than Netvibes
• Protopage - Items can hover over each other or be locked into grid. Easy url for sharing. Some of the interface seems a little to “jumpy” to me but its a pretty good site. You can setup a theme and “wallpaper”.

The following sites you might keep your eye on as they will probably add this feature soon.

• Netvibes - Will soon be able to share “universe”, right now if you share something it basically sets up someone else with the same widgets in the same place, which isn’t that great. You can select a theme or setup a wallpaper. They seem to have more options for each widget than the other sites such as: minimize in place (collapses the widget), text links to move it, color options for every widget, and a few others.
• Webwag - Its like Pageflakes and Netvibes. The best feature is the fact you can create your own widget from any website, basically it has an interface to create an iframe for any site on the web. So even if something isn’t available in a Feed or Web Service you can get it. I believe Apple’s desktop widgets allow for this also. Sharing requires it to be approved and won’t give you a unique URL, it just gives the person viewing it the same modules.

Of course there are other ways to build your own portal. You could put try to find a good JavaScript library or extension that supports drag and drop and build your own widgets. So far I’ve yet to do any research into which ones are good, I know jQuery has one called Interface, but I haven’t tried it out.

There aren’t any open source apps that do this, but eyeOS and Brim come close. eyeOS is considered a Web Desktop and Brim is a WIM/PIM.

Another way is to put up a static web page and use some gadgets/widgets/whatever you want to call them that will work on a web page. Most ISPs will give you plenty of web space, so you could build your own. Google provides plenty of gadgets for your web site, some of them are made by Google, others are done by individuals or companies. Yahoo also provides badges for your web site, so far the only one I like is their Finance Stock Badge. Some sites are offering JavaScript based modules on their site, for example Digg does this and AccuWeather and Weather.com have weather modules. The main problem with this is that your site will look pretty lame. But if you are building your own portal, chances are its just for yourself so it won’t matter.

If you look at your local TV station’s web site, chances are it sucks. In fact I don’t think I’ve ever seen a local TV station have a good web site. It’s kind of a shame also as they have lots of video and resources to put together good content for a local market. Most people go to local television web sites for one thing, weather. While the local market online gets more and more heated with Craig’s List and Topix jumping in and of course your local Newspaper’s web site, it makes sense someone in the local television industry finally woke up and realized that with everyone else putting video online, they need to get on the ball. Nexstar Broadcasting seems to understand that their future is not just more and more television but to reach out online as well.

They have started pushing out templates of their local portals to their stations across the nation. Here are a few:
WTVW
WYOU

They feature weather (current conditions, 7 day forecast and a radar), free classifieds (auto, real estate, other), business directory (with Google Maps), forums, news, web cam, and video. I can’t say I like the layout and how you can position things around, because its not really necessary, and their glossy buttons don’t go with he rest of the site, at least they got the content part right. Their sites are really terrible SEO-wise.

Problem is that most television stations don’t have their own web development staff (maybe the really big stations, but I’m talking about medium/small city America). Local TV web sites have a ways to go before they can really compete online, but it will be interesting to see if this trend spreads to other television companies.

Recently the NAA (Newspaper Association of America) had a meeting in New York, about a state of their industry. While I didn’t attend, I am slightly familiar with what needs to be done. If the Newspaper is going to survive online and take online seriously, then they need to take web development seriously. Stop giving your data to third party vendors and paying them to access your own data in their proprietary web application. If you don’t want to build the web application, you might be able to find a open source solution.

But why are they using third party vendors?

Pros:

• They don’t have to code, manage, modify the application.
• They can find something to fit their needs today (and switch vendors later down the road when someone else builds one better).

Cons:

• Most of the time your data is hosted on another URL.
• Messy templates, css hacks required, iframe and javascript to get things to look like your main web site.
• Vendors will often reuse your data for their own national site (all the while getting paid by you).
• You are locked into their feature set and can’t add new features or modules.
• Too many applications to fit little niches from other vendors and no easy way to bring them all together.

This is a great business model. Get a customers data and have them pay you for it.

I figured I’d give some examples of third party vendors that get data from newspapers and reuse them on their national sites. Kaango is a classifieds vendor. They get data from newspapers around the country, however their homepage allows you to search for classifieds from around the country.

CareerSite is a employment vendor. CareerSite takes data from newspapers and redistributes it to NowHiring and to SnagAJob. A few months ago when you went to careersite.com it would go to nowhiring.com, however recently they changed it to look like a careersite template (its easy to tell its a template, because they always use numbers as a subdomain). Makes me wonder why they are hiding the fact of what they are doing? Now I’m not sure of what kind of contracts they have with the newspaper, but it seemed CareerSite had an awesome deal. I even saw a few Newspapers allow CareerSite to run Google Ads on their Job site. So not only were they getting customer data, they were getting paid for it and allowed to run ads on it! Doing a search on the Wayback Machine can prove all this. I also found out all those sites seemed to still be owned by PowerOne Media. So why do they use like three different names for the same service? Maybe its all legit in their agreements with newspapers, but if so the Newspapers are not doing themselves any justice by helping another website grab their data.

Why not build your own apps, add what features you want and when you want, work with your own nice templates, host them on your own domains and be able to remash up this data more easily with each other?

But it doesn’t stop there, there are countless vendors that do this for all sorts of things. Often times newspapers will use one vendor for a jobs app, another for autos, another for real estate and yet another for regular classifieds. Sometimes you will find even two applications being used for the same functionality but one will offer some special feature that the other doesn’t.

If the internet is the to be their saving grace they need to get on the ball rather than trying to take shortcuts.