Websites

BlogTO introduces maps — on paper

Four Toronto neighbourhood maps. Picture: blogTO

The ever-innovative blogTO, one of Toronto’s top blog sites, is expanding into print with a series of local maps available from retailers in various neighbourhoods. The series begins with four maps, shown above.

BlogTO editor Tim Shore sees advertising opportunities for local businesses, as well as a way to draw more people to blogTO:

Each map includes profiles of 80 or more great local spots grouped into categories like restaurants, bars and cafes, art galleries, fashion, furniture and design and beauty and health. Forty of the profiles on each map also come with full colour photos. And the whole thing is also integrated with the blogTO web site. So if you want to learn more about, say, Little Italy, you can go read about it in our new neighbourhood section.

Although the world is going digital, and increasingly wireless, I’m betting these old-school maps will still prove popular for their ease of use. And for their price — free.

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CanWest unveils local search and directories

CanWest Mediaworks has announced plans to publish local directories, in print and online, in three cities.

Ottawa is first on the schedule, with a directory to be launched this summer. Similar products will appear in Regina and Saskatoon early next year. According to the announcement:

The Ottawa directory will offer consumers complete business listings, glossy print maps, a complete and easy to reference government section, community information section including schools, recreation, and parks information, a restaurant guide for dining selection, and large ads full of information to help fine-tune buying decisions. The initial online offering will also include mapping, search and driving directions.

CanWest’s portfolio includes the Ottawa Citizen, Regina Leader-Post and Saskatoon StarPhoenix daily newspapers, the canada.com portal, and broadcasting stations.

In addition to advertising in the print directory, businesses can advertise online in their local pages on the canada.com network, offering advertisers potential cross-promotion alongside the CanWest network. Online advertising can be purchased with specialized packages to meet individual businesses’ needs, offering advertisers the choice to include ad creative, URLs, email addresses, additional descriptive text, and more.

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Ad spending up 22% at US newspaper sites

According to the latest “preliminary estimates” from the Newspaper Association of America, advertising expenditure on newspaper websites rose 22.3 per cent to US$750 million in the first quarter of this year, compared with the same quarter last year.

The increase reflects the twelfth consecutive quarter of double digit growth for online newspaper advertising since NAA started reporting online ad spending in 2004. Advertising on newspaper websites made up 7.1 per cent of total newspaper ad spending in the first quarter compared with 5.5 per cent for the same period a year ago.

“The percentage of ad spending generated by newspaper websites continues to grow as advertisers realize the value of the medium’s web audience – a group of consumers who have higher household incomes and shop online more frequently than other internet users,” said NAA President and CEO John F. Sturm. “We expect advertising on newspaper websites to continue to contribute to the industry’s overall revenue stream as newspapers provide innovative content and up-to-the-minute news and information our audience demands.”

Advertising expenditures at newspapers and their websites totaled US$10.6 billion for the first quarter of 2007, a 4.8 per cent decrease from the same period a year earlier. Spending for print ads in newspapers totaled US$9.8 billion, down 6.4 per cent versus the same period a year earlier.

So, it’s the familiar story. Websites need to increase revenue (e.g. by selling more ads and/or more expensive ads) to offset the declining print advertising revenue.

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BBC, ESPN, MarketWatch among Eppy winners

eppy_awards.jpg 

The annual Eppy awards for media websites were announced in Miami today by Editor & Publisher.

But wait, Craigslist didn’t even make the finalists for Best Classifieds site? 😉

Best News Web Site (more than one million unique visitors per month)
WINNER: BBC News
Bloomberg.com
The Wall Street Journal Online

Best News Web Site (fewer than one million unique visitors per month)
WINNER: asap (The Associated Press)
AzStarNet.com – Arizona Daily Star
HeraldTribune.com – Sarasota (Fla.) Herald-Tribune
PilotOnline.com – The Virginian-Pilot

Best Media-Affiliated News Blog
WINNER: The Swamp (Chicagotribune.com)
The Buzz (Tampabay.com)
The Fix (Washingtonpost.com)

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Star mashes map for Doors Open event

Doors Open Toronto map at thestar.com

Congratulations to thestar.com for publishing a Google map [rendered at reduced size above] showing the 150 sites for this weekend’s Doors Open Toronto.

It’s a perfect complement to the official Doors Open site, which has lots of data about the buildings that will be open to the public on Saturday and Sunday, but really lousy maps [each map shows only one venue, and the quality is poor – why they didn’t use Google, I can’t imagine].

The Star is one of the media sponsors of Doors Open.

– via blogTO

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Globe site even better after redesign

New globeandmail.com front page - Mary 23, 2007 

I’ve been an admirer of the globeandmail.com design ever since the site was revamped in February last year with a new look and Web 2.0 tools.

But the site’s front page got even better this week with the elimination of the vertical navigation column. Thank you G&M!

It’s not that I don’t like vertical nav. It’s just that when you already have three horizontal nav menus at the top of the page, things start to get pretty cluttered and confusing.

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Search drives update of Yellow Pages online — and in print

Search is ‘front-and-centre’ on the new Yellow Pages site 

The Yellow Pages print edition is being reshaped by the way people search in the Yellow Pages online edition.

As Grant Robertson wrote yesterday at reportonbusiness.com, online search behaviour revealed deficiences in the Yellow Pages’ information structure:

When people went to its website to find a sushi restaurant, they typed the word “sushi,” not “restaurants – Japanese” or “restaurants – seafood.”

Moreover, search terms being used online show how customer needs change over time — information that will reshape the print edition of the famed business directory:

…you can already bid adieu to “armouries” and “buttonhole makers” as categories next year. They’re being discarded in favour of breakout terms like “tapas” and “wine cellars.”

It’s also interesting to compare the recently revamped Yellow Pages website with its predecessor. The old site devoted much of its front page to the traditional Yellow Pages directory structure, the “Restaurants – Japanese” approach. Category lists have now been relegated to a small link on a page built around keyword search.

Thanks to the ease of tracking online search terms, the Yellow Pages print edition is set to become a more useful product too.

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