SEO Comes to the Federal Government December 11, 2008

Peter Whoriskey writes in The Washington Post today about the U.S. government’s work with search engine giants Google and Microsoft in opening up previously “hidden” site pages for better SEO. Virtually millions of federal Web pages are largely invisible to Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search engines mostly because the data, while public, can only be accessed after filling out an online form and crawlers generally skip over these kind of databases. To make databases visible, the feds have to make each item into a Web page and then provide a list of those Web page URLs to the search engines.

The Post article notes some grumbling by federal information technology officials over the costs and manpower needed to transition their sites — the Smithsonian alone gave Google 78,000 links. But given that users these days expect immediate gratification to search queries or else will usually exit the site, it looks like a necessary step in the right direction to better serve the public as well as building site traffic.

Andrew Sullivan on Watching Old Media Die December 8, 2008

Last night while checking my RSS feeds, I saw this TimesOnline column by one of my favorite bloggers, Andrew Sullivan, about the looming death of print newspapers. Pretty timely given the latest torrent of bad news coming from the world of legacy media companies: Tribune Co., owner of the Chicago Tribune, Los Angeles Times and Baltimore Sun, filing for possible bankruptcy this week; The New York Times borrowing up to $225 million against the value of its mid-Manhattan headquarters building; McClatchy looking for a buyer for The Miami Herald; and E.W. Scripps Co. selling the Rocky Mountain News.

UPDATE: (Within a few minutes of going live with this post, I received word that the Tribune Co. is filing for bankruptcy. Another one bites the dust. UPDATE 2: Given the company’s almost $13 billion of debt along with declining local tv and newspaper ad revenues, it’s a tough road ahead for the Tribune Co. )

Sullivan, a blogger since 2000, gives the history of his blog as to why bloggers hold such an economic advantage over these legacy media companies, despite the best efforts of these companies to beef up their websites:

“To give my own example: I started blogging eight years ago. My once quirky blog, born in time to cover the 2000 election campaign, has steadily grown in traffic over the years, but this year, with the election campaign and a media revolution, it went into the stratosphere. In October last year my blog got 3.5m page views; in October this year it had 23m page views. The story of the campaign, in other words, did find a readership (and page views of big online papers soared as well). The growth just didn’t occur in newsprint, and the next generation of readers – those now under 30 – barely knows what a newspaper is.

Now compare my little blog’s traffic with The Baltimore Sun, a big metropolitan paper with a long history and great reputation, featured most recently in the HBO series The Wire. It had 17.5m page views in October; The Dallas Morning News got 12m; The Atlanta Journal-Constitution got 14m. The operation largely run out of my spare room reached many more online readers than some of the biggest and most loss-making papers in the country. The economics are remorseless: as news goes online, the economic model for papers cannot survive. If advertising follows page views, the game will shortly be over.”

Will large newspapers, even if offered online-only, survive? Only time will tell. But I also agree with Sullivan that blogs are not a complete substitute because most blogs don’t have the budgets and staff to do in depth reporting (Josh Marshall’s Talking Points Memo and Huffington Post are notable exceptions), and often rely on traditional media sources to back up an opinion or issue. Add this to the tremendous loss to the public discourse and it will be a sad day indeed, should only a few media companies manage to survive.

Hello Earth! Tweeting from Mars… December 6, 2008

Saw this story yesterday about NASA’s popular Mars Phoenix Lander Twitter feed.

“When NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory News Services manager Veronica McGregor was tasked with delivering word of the agency’s first-ever robotic landing on Mars during a holiday weekend, she turned to the social-networking website.

Readership and viewership in traditional news media usually goes down over a three-day weekend,” said McGregor, a former CNN correspondent.”

McGregor created a distinctive Twitter persona for the Lander and the number of followers skyrocketed to over 39,000.

“The Lander’s writing style helped the blog stand out, according to Twitter co-founder Biz Stone.

“It was the way she chose to send out the updates — in the first person and anthropomorphizing the Lander — that really made all of the difference,” Stone said. “As a result, NASA gets a level of engagement with citizens they didn’t have before.”

Pleased with the Phoenix Lander’s Twitter success, NASA plans on adding more Twitter feeds for future agency missions.

First White House Cabinet blogger and Change.gov news December 6, 2008

I’ve been buried with a big project for a few weeks but now that it’s been delivered — yeah! — I wanted to post a few blasts of presidential transition new media news that have been piling up in my bookmarks folder:

Peter Orzag, tapped by President-elect Obama to head up the Office of Management and Budget, (OMB) did a final goodbye post at his former blog at the Congressional Budget Office, saying of his blogging experience:

“This blog has also been a special treat: it has provided another way of discussing CBO’s work and some of my own views about the policy world.”

OMB doesn’t list any blogs on its site but given the Obama administration’s emphasis on Web 2.0 technologies, it wouldn’t surprise me to see one developed to add another line of communication to the public.

In other transition news, HuffingtonPost reports that Barack Obama will publicize the names and agenda items of the groups that are meeting with its transition team on a new Change.gov site page called: Your Seat at the Table. On this page, online visitors can track meetings, view documents provided to the Transition, and leave comments for the transition team. John Podesta, Obama-Biden Transition Project Co-chair ,described the move in a staff memo: ” Every day, we meet with organizations who present ideas for the Transition and the Administration, both orally and in writing. We want to ensure that we give the American people a ’seat at the table’ and that we receive the benefit of their feedback.”

It will be interesting to see if the Obama team will offer any additional online engagement in the form of updates and comments on what they’re hearing in the public feedback. It’s one thing to solicit discussion of new ideas as they did previously on the issue of health care, but for this new site initiative, will they really talk the engagement talk beyond posting a “Comments for this discussion have closed” message?