The Austin American-Statesman has partnered with Quattro Wireless and updated their mobile web portal. You can view the new mobile site by visiting http://statesman.com in your mobile browser, or directly by visiting http://statesman.qwapi.com. I’d never seen the qwapi.com domain before, but a little Google search shows that the service is quite popular with content portals. The NBA, CoverGirl, Boston.com, and Playboy Mobile all use the service to deliver mobile content.
Interestingly, visiting the root domain qwapi.com goes to a GoDaddy domain parking page.
Wondering why the local Austin paper doesn’t have a Twitter account so I can get updates like NYT. Ryan, thoughts?
Paul Menard via Twitter
Well, it’s true that you can find Twitter accounts for the New York Times, CNN, BBC, TechCrunch, et al. However, it’s not clear how many of those are actually official branding efforts by those media organizations. In fact, the open nature of the Twitter API and the fact that these companies offer their latest headlines as RSS feeds mean anyone can create a news “river”.
Regardless I had to take up the challenge after being called out directly. I quickly registered accounts from both Statesman.com and Austin360.com. A quick and dirty PHP script later set up as a cron job and voila! While these sites are among those of my employer, my Twitter accounts do not constitute an “official” use of this syndication method. The NYTimes twitter was set up in a similar vein by Jacob Harris
http://twitter.com/statesman
http://twitter.com/austin360
Update: I’ve turned off the cron job until some sort of contextual relevance can be offered to any potential users. Breaking news, weather, jury verdicts, traffic, ticket sales, event listings, A-List events are all options.
What are your thoughts? What kind of updates would you be interested in receiving?
Today we launched the first version of a project started in mid-January: StatesmanShopping
I might write more on this later…
I finished 1454 out of 16,082 runners in this year’s 30th annual Statesman Capitol 10,000 with a chip-time of 52:46.2 minutes and an average pace of 8:30/mile.
Besides me not passing out, other notable news from that day was that Nicodemus Malakwen broke the previous course record by finishing in 29:42 minutes.
Last week Statesman.com won the 2007 Digital Edge Award for Best Design and Site Architecture from the Newspaper Association of America. The Statesman.com was also a finalist in the Most Innovative Multimedia Storytelling category.
Each year the ‘Edgies‘, founded in 1996, recognize online publishers from newspapers of all sizes that engage online audiences with Web-enhanced news coverage and effectively deliver advertisers’ interactive marketing messages. NAA is a nonprofit organization representing the $59 billion newspaper industry and more than 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada. Most NAA members are daily newspapers, accounting for 87 percent of the U.S. daily circulation.
Those are some impressive stats.
While I am extremely honored to be one of the key individuals who work every day to make this website one of the best out there, much of the honor goes to my former co-worker, whose previous position I now hold, Leesa. She tirelessly worked to ensure that the site was the latest and greatest in terms of CSS and table-less design while living up to the actual design elements. No easy task, I assure you.
Local and online coverage here, here, and here.
