links for 2010-12-16

At the new offices of The Register Citizen in this faded old mill town, there’s a sign out front welcoming residents to come in for coffee and muffins at the Newsroom Café — sort of Starbucks meets “Lou Grant.” Mimeographed fliers reading “Public Welcome!” invite people to walk in and participate in the 4 p.m. story conference. Residents are free to stroll through the newsroom as reporters peck out stories.

Why not try something completely different, says Trippenbach, like "non-narrative forms of media that are much much more effective"?

"Stories are very good at relating events, whereas it's extremely important to understand systems. And the best way to learn how a system works is by interacting with it, by playing with it."

To get a better understanding, we ran an analysis of 3 million SMB’s in multiple verticals and locations, and used that data to look at just the vertical sites and just the local sites – and found some interesting things.

this is great news for small publishers, such as hyperlocal news or niche sites. You can be a part of that single Web page of Internet news. Concentrate on the original content instead of copying; create the one copy only you or your organization can create. If you don't believe me, listen to Gawker's Nick Denton: scoop generates audience, which in turn generates advertising.

list of things to avoid when building communities:

* Not having a clear objective – if you have clarity on your purpose, the people in that community have a reason to be there.
* Avoid fixation on numbers – social media a source of referrals but don’t chase numbers at the expense of saturation.
* Don’t broadcast at your community – to quote Clay Shirky, it’s about creating an environment for supporting people.
* Forget the idea that it’s all about the technology – it’s about the people. Understand who are the authoritative people in your market. People like something to do and respond to openness.
* Avoid not being a part of it yourself.

@Storify experiment in covering the day.