Skip the Scanner – Get Emergency Audio Online
If you’re starting or already running a local news blog, there’s no doubt that a police/fire scanner is one of your must-have tools. Or is it? That may depend on your home/office setup and how you prefer to listen to emergency radio traffic.
You might be able to skip the scanner and listen online via the Radio Reference web site, a portal for all things related to emergency radio communications.
Radio Reference offers links to online feeds of hundreds of emergency radio frequencies across the U.S. and in dozens of other countries, too. You can see what’s available by starting at the site’s Live Audio page. You’ll land on a U.S. map, but there’s a “Country” dropdown on the left for folks elsewhere in the world.
In my home state of Washington, the map shows that live audio is available for most of the highly-populated areas of the state.
By the way, this is the audio source used in the Emergency Radio iPhone app that I wrote about last year here on HLB. So, whether you’re at home or out and about, you can keep up with what’s happening around town and make sure that your blog has the latest news at all times.
CouponMap: Easy Way to Add Coupons to Your Blog
It might be the recession, it might be something else. “It” is Americans growing use of coupons. The LA Times recently reported that coupon use is on the rise — a 20% gain in redemptions between 2006 and 2009.
So, if people are more interested in coupons, should your hyperlocal blog help them find what they’re looking for? If you think so, let me suggest CouponMap as probably the easiest way to add coupons to your blog. The site is primarily a coupon search engine, but it also offers a super-easy-to-embed widget that you should be able to add to your in about three minutes.
Here’s how it works…
Start on the CouponMap widget page, which looks like this:
You can center the map on any zip code, landmark, or street address. I started out by using my local zip codes, then moved the map around to see where the best concentration of coupons was. I chose an address in the center of that map and set it as my center point. You can customize height and width to fit your blog, and adjust the border of your map, too.
You’ll end up with about 10 lines of javascript code that can be embedded anywhere on your blog. I chose to make new blog pages, but you could put the map in your sidebar if you prefer. Here’s what the implementation looks like on our Kennewick real estate blog:
Each icon is a coupon; click it and the coupon detail pops up in the same way you’re familiar with from using Google Maps. The coupons I’ve found are coming from sites like Restaurant.com, Valpak.com, GoGrocery, and others. If you go to CouponMap.com, you can click “Coupon Providers” in the upper right to see more sources.
I’ve installed coupon pages on three of our four local blogs:
The fourth city, West Richland, doesn’t have enough of a retail base to justify adding the map. But these are small towns I’m dealing with. Take a look at the Seattle map I’ll embed below:
Pretty nice, isn’t it? I think adding a map like that on your blog can be a real valuable content addition.
What are your thoughts? Is this something you’d consider adding to your blog? Comments are open for your pros and/or cons.
Our Best Hyperlocal Content in 2009
In the last post here on HLB, I shared the most popular posts on this blog, Hyperlocal Blogger. What I want to talk about in this post is the most popular content on the four hyperlocal blogs that my wife and I run. Those blogs are:
Richland Real Estate Blog
Kennewick Real Estate Blog
Pasco Real Estate Blog
West Richland Real Estate Blog
I’ve explained this before, but if you’re a new reader, it’s worth knowing that these are not your typical, news-oriented local blogs. Among the different types of local blogs, ours exist in part to help promote my wife’s real estate business. We don’t chase ambulances around town and don’t report much hard news at all. We mostly report news about the local schools, local events, local businesses, and so forth. But, ironically, some of our most popular posts across the four blogs in 2009 were the ones that did report hard news.
Our Most Popular Content Types
I’m not going to list the exact posts that drew the most traffic to each blog, mainly because I know there are competing real estate agents (with blogs) that read this blog, and I’d rather not give them too many specific ideas for what they should be writing about. But I will share the types of posts that brought the most traffic to our hyperlocal blogs.
Methodology: I found the top five posts written in 2009 on each of the four blogs, for a total of 20 popular blog posts about Tri-Cities, Washington. And then I put those posts into categories as best I could. There’s some overlap, of course — a story about something important happening at school could go under “News” or “Schools,” so I did my best to classify according to the real intent of the post.
Results: Here’s the breakdown of the most popular content in my hometown:
- News / Hard News: 7 posts out of 20
- Events / Things to Do: 6 posts ” ”
- Schools: 3 posts ” ”
- Businesses: 3 posts ” ”
- Sights: 1 post ” ”
I’m both surprised and somewhat not surprised to see News/Hard News as the top content type. Surprised because we don’t write much content like that … but not surprised because I’m well aware of the thirst for local news online these days. (See Why Local Blogging Works and Why NOW is the Best Time to Start a Local Blog.)
Our Top Sources of Local Content
One more thing I’ll share: where the traffic to our four blogs came from. Here’s the chart…
I’m not at all surprised that search engines sent 73% of the traffic to our local blogs. Referring sites (like Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, Bloglines, etc.) sent 17%, and direct traffic was 9%. (The “other” category made up the final 1%.) As I mentioned in Why Local Blogging Works, local web sites are often poorly optimized and search engines love a good blog. To me, this shows the importance of knowing at least the basics of blog SEO and making sure you’re keeping search engines in mind as you create content.
(And that begs the question, would a post or two about SEO for local blogs be helpful? Please let me know.)
Final Thoughts
Even though our local blogs aren’t very traditional, I think their performance in 2009 actually helps prove some of the traditional points about hyperlocal blogging as a whole. People are looking for local news online, and hyperlocal blogs can fill a void that more and more newspapers and TV/radio stations aren’t filling (due to layoffs, lack of profits, etc.).
While I don’t see us changing the approach of our blogs, this information only piques my interest even more toward starting a local online news site, one not bound by a desire to promote Cari’s real estate business. I’m curious to see what might happen.
I’m also curious to hear from you: What types of content worked best for you in 2009? and Where did your traffic come from? Comments are open. Let’s talk.
What Hyperlocal Content Works for You?
I’m curious: On your local blog/web site, what type(s) of content work the best for you? What draws the most traffic or comments or whatever you use to measure success?
Not too long ago I was reading this Peter Krasilovsky blog post that talks about AOL and, more specifically, the hyperlocal Patch.com project that AOL is doing. In particular, these comments from Patch.com President Warren Webster caught my eye — he’s talking about the hyperlocal content they find to be most interesting to readers.
“Police and fire information is very popular,” and “government news inspires a lot of debate,” he said. Webster was surprised, however, that weddings and obituaries aren’t more popular at this point — perhaps because users aren’t yet conditioned to get that information from a local online site. School sports have been more promising.
I’m surprised to see him mention police and fire information, but that’s probably because Cari and I very rarely post content like that on our hyperlocal blogs. So, I have no evidence in our analytics to tell me whether or not it’s popular. In my experience, our most popular blog posts have mostly been about upcoming local events.
What about you? What kind of content has worked best on your local blogs?
OpenlyLocal WordPress plugin looks cool
Over in the UK, Philip John has just announced a new OpenlyLocal WordPress plugin that looks very cool. (Hope he doesn’t mind me grabbing the screenshot from his blog post!)
You tell the plugin which is your local UK council and it grabs data from the (also very cool) OpenlyLocal web site and turns it into a widget that shows upcoming council meetings.
Of course, this is only for UK-based local bloggers. If you’re not a UK blogger and you’re on WordPress, you can use the existing RSS widget to do something similar … but only if your local government web site offers an RSS feed of upcoming meetings. In my experience, many don’t.
(BTW, we could use something like OpenlyLocal over here in the US. Does anything like it exist?)
How to Create a Local Newswire for your Blog
I’ve mentioned before that my wife and I don’t run hyperlocal news blogs. Yes, we post news, but it’s not “hard news” and we purposely stay away from potentially polarizing topics like politics. That’s because the main purpose of the blogs isn’t to be a news source, but to indirectly increase my wife’s visibility as a local real estate agent. We post about community events, school-related news, and stuff like that, while skipping accidents, crime, politics, and so forth.
But I also recognize that people reading our blogs might want some more local news, so just this past week we added what I’ve called a “local newswire” to each of our four local blogs. Here’s a screenshot from the newswire on our Richland real estate blog:
This might be a valuable page for any hyperlocal blogger, whether you run a news blog or not. The main requirement is that you’re using WordPress. (If someone wants to write similar instructions for another blog platform, let me know and I’ll gladly link to it or let you post it here as a guest article.) If you’re using WordPress, here’s how to do it.
How to Create a Hyperlocal Newswire
1. Download, install, and activate the Lifestream plugin. This plugin lets you aggregate an unlimited number of RSS feeds into a single page on your blog. (Or into a post, I suppose.) Lifestream has its own requirements (PHP 5, MySQL 5+, etc.), so check your hosting setup to make sure it’ll work.
2. Make a list of local RSS feeds that you want to pull into your newswire. Local newspaper, local TV, you name it. Just grab the URLs of each RSS feed and save it in a text file.
3. Add each RSS feed URL into the Lifestream admin/settings page. As you can see from the screenshot below, Lifestream pre-supports a few dozen types of feeds — Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and many more. I used a few of those, but mostly used the “Generic” RSS feed.
When you click on the “Generic” button there, it leads you to a short and simple form where you supply the feed URL. If you want, you can also give it a label that will show up on your public newswire page — like “WKRP News” or something like that.
If you want to have little customized icons like we do (see the Google and Yahoo icons in the first screenshot above), then you’ll need to create those (16 x 16 each) and indicate the URL for each icon when you add the feed. Or you can skip this and have the generic orange RSS feed icon show up each time. Your call.
4. Repeat step 3 for each feed you want to include in your newswire.
5. Create the newswire page. Just create the new page, give it a name and URL in your WordPress admin, and make sure to put
[lifestream]
as the page content. That’s all you need. Hit Publish and you’ve got a local newswire. Congrats! But wait, one more thing to share….
How to Handle Non-Specific RSS Feeds
If we had one blog for our entire region, the above is all I would’ve needed to do. But we have four blogs, one for each of the main cities in this area. And the local media covers all four cities — in other words, the local paper’s RSS feed includes news about all four cities, when we only want news from one city appearing on each blog.
How do you pull out news for a single city from an RSS feed that covers many cities?
Try Yahoo Pipes. Now listen, I’m one of the least technologically smart people I know. Programming makes my eyes glaze over and puts me to sleep. So if I can figure out how to use Yahoo Pipes, you can, too.
You’ll need a Yahoo account and all that stuff. Login to Yahoo, go to the Pipes URL above, and click the button to create a new pipe. Then here’s what I did:
1. Under the SOURCES tab on the left, click “Fetch Feed.” This adds a module to your pipe that lets you add any number of RSS feeds. Cut and paste the URLs of all the generic feeds into this module.
2. Under the OPERATORS tab on the left, click “Filter.” This adds a module that you can use to filter the content of your pipe. In my case, I’m taking the RSS feeds of all the local TV stations and the local newspaper and I’m going to filter them to include only stories that say “Richland” in the headline, and ignore stories that say “West Richland,” a separate town. (There are additional filtering options, but I’m just using this for now.)
3. Once you have both modules setup the way you want, make the pipe. Use the fun pipe-y interface to connect “Fetch Feed” to “Filter” and then connect “Filter” to “Pipe Output.” When you’re done, it should look something like this:
At this point, click the “Pipe Output” module to test what you’ve done. Some results should show up at the bottom of the screen, telling you that you’ve created your first Yahoo Pipe.
4. Wrap it up and get out of there. Save your pipe and give it a name if you haven’t already. Click the “Back to My Pipes” link, and then on that next page, click the name of your pipe — this will take you to the page that has the RSS feed of the pipe you just made.
5. Grab the pipe’s RSS feed URL and add it to Lifestream. Once you have the RSS feed URL, do the same thing you did in step 3 above when adding feeds to Lifestream.
Step 6 – pat yourself on the back for figuring out how to use Yahoo Pipes!
See It In Action!
If you’d like to see the four newswires we’ve just published, here are the links:
Richland Newswire
Kennewick Newswire
Pasco Newswire
West Richland Newswire
These are only a couple days old, so you’ll see that there’s still some cleanup work to do in places — fonts, font sizes, etc. And since they’re so new, I have no stats to share about how many times the pages get visited or anything like that.
Final Thoughts
I think there’s value in this kind of content no matter what kind of hyperlocal blog you have. For Cari and me, it adds a lot of news content to our blog — most of which we wouldn’t write about ourselves. But even if you do have a news blog, I think there’s value in aggregating other local news content so that your readers have a one-stop source for what’s going on locally.
As I mentioned, if there’s a way to do something similar on non-WordPress blogs, leave a comment or send me an email so I can link to your “how to” or invite to write one as a guest post. If you already have a newswire-type page on your blog, or have questions about what I’ve described above, the comments are open.
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