The all new CitizenRain.com
Cory Bergman April 10th, 2008
We just relaunched CitizenRain.com here at KING in Seattle.
The original Citizen Rain aggregated local blogs by topic, like sports and real estate. Now we’ve added communities. So if you click on Belltown, for example, you’ll see the latest news stories and blog posts written about the neighborhood, updated every half-hour. Plus, we’ve added community event calendars, free classifieds and user stories.
More later. In the meantime, I’ll be talking about the new site at NAB-RTNDA next week on the RTNDA panel, “Beyond Local,” Tuesday at 9 a.m. If you’re at the convention, make sure to stop by — we’ll be talking about innovative ways to grow audience and revenue outside traditional news, weather and traffic.
Update: Michael Malone over at Broadcasting & Cable has posted a blurb.
14 Comments Add your own
1. Hanson | April 10th, 2008 at 3:01 pm
Cory, great work. This is a really valuable resource for us citizens of Rain. I’m going to spread the word at the UW.
2. Jimmy | April 10th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
Nice looking site, Cory. I’m a recent subscriber to LR and didn’t realize how close the founder was located to me.
I work as the webmaster / developer for the FOX affiliate over here on the other side of the Cascades (Spokane)… Wish I could make it to that talk.
Since we don’t produce news in house, we’re facing issues directly related to what you’re going to be talking about. We’ve been forced to “think outside the box” when it comes to revenue, specifically with the web, since we don’t offer local news on our web.
We’ve discovered what works best for us though is focusing on external initiatives and making large web tie-ins with those initiatives.
I bet working in a market like Seattle’s is a dream for selling web compared to us “little folk” over here though…
3. tdc | April 10th, 2008 at 3:26 pm
yes, as always, alot of work must have gone into it.
please let us know how “beyond local” goes… sounds like it might be an interesting exchange.
not to highjack the thread, but i wanted to point out to “Z” how i was “impressed” by the number of geo-targeted ads i was served TODAY. while visiting “beyond local” web channels in boston, denver, and indianapolis i was served with nordstrom ads touting the opening of a new store in michigan, a bottom-feeder metro detroit real estate buyer offered to buy any property i had for sale and monster offered me 3 positions at ryder in detroit.
all of them overlaying content 600-1200 miles from where i was sitting, but relevant.
howdeydodat?
4. Platform | April 10th, 2008 at 3:45 pm
CitizenRain appears to be running on MovableType. Can you tell us why you chose that, over other systems like WordPress?
5. Cory | April 10th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Yep, correct, Movable Type, with some other stuff bolted on. I’m a big fan of Wordpress (obviously, as it powers LR), but we moved ahead with MT because A) the company is already using it B) we were already very adept at bending MT to our needs and C) we tapped into some new SixApart features that are working pretty well for us.
Of course, Drupal and ExpressionEngine are two other ways to do this.
6. Z | April 10th, 2008 at 4:48 pm
Guess advertisers think Detroit has money to spend or something. I’ve still yet to be served a local ad on a non-local site.
And no, I’m not moving to Detroit just to get that
7. Rob | April 10th, 2008 at 5:17 pm
The new look Citizen Rain looks hella cool. I’ve already bookmarked the Naked Loon too … it’s like hyperlocal Onion.
8. Z | April 10th, 2008 at 5:22 pm
I see you’re using Trumba for community events. I’ve tried for six months to get us to use that, but all they see are the fees (which aren’t much). Grrrrr.
9. Ryan Pitts | April 10th, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Very cool, Cory. New site looks great. Out of curiosity, have you run into any Flickr users who are upset that you’re running their images? Especially on a page with ads?
At one point last year we had some Flickr users upset that we even *linked* to a local pool of photos, accusing us of profiting off their work. (How they concluded that we profited by nefariously posting a one-line text link to their pool of public images, I’m not sure.) Anyway, just curious how you’re handling this issue.
10. Cory | April 10th, 2008 at 6:59 pm
Ryan, haven’t had that problem. In my experience so far, photographers here are happy for the exposure — in thumbnail form.
The Trumba calendar is very cool. They even created a little geo-search hack for us.
11. tdc | April 10th, 2008 at 7:03 pm
that mike malone guy is alright.
he has some nice things to say about “rain’ over at b&c.
12. Rocker | April 11th, 2008 at 1:35 pm
z - how do you know you haven’t been served any local ads on non-local sites? I though nobody sees ads? Maybe you just missed ‘em.
13. Rick Ellis | April 11th, 2008 at 6:31 pm
tdc–as to how they geo-targeted you, depending on who was running the ad network, it was some combintion of cookis, IP sniffing and other trackable info.
this geotargeting is the core of the new Yahoo/newspaper consprtium ad network as well s the new fox local media ad network.
The premise is that you can more effectively sell local ads by delivering them to “local” readers, no mattr what site they are visiting.
14. tdc | April 11th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
couldn’t have said it better myself.
thanks rick!
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