matt weighs in

On Tuesday night, Laura and I attended the fourth Bloginar event put on by WCCO in downtown Minneapolis. It was our first one, so we weren’t exactly sure what to expect, except they promised free food, a chance to network with other bloggers and social media folks in the Twin Cities, and door prizes. Oh my, the door prizes, which Laura and I both came away from as winners. More below.

The Bloginar (name change in the future?) was led by John Daenzer, the Director of New Media for WCCO-TV and WCCO.com. He seemed comfortable in front of the group and did a fine job as MC for the evening. We were invited by Laura’s childhood friend, Crystal, so we sat with her, devouring take-out pizza and cookies from Davanni’s as we waited and caught up. The agenda for the evening was short, which is nice for us folks who don’t want to keep the babysitters out too late on a weeknight. There was a Q&A session with TinyURL founder Kevin Gilbertson, and then John introduced WCCO’s The Wire, their soon-to-be-unveiled online interactive news community.

The interview session with Kevin was ok, as John asked him expected questions, such as how did he come up with the idea, what are the plans for the future, and what avenues they’re pursuing to make money amd keep it viable. All good questions, in my opinion, but the answers left a little to be desired. Kevin responded woth short answers with not much elaboration. I gathered that he came up with TinyURL as a way to shorten URLs first in newsgroups back around 2000, so they weren’t broken up on two lines, that they would like to use analytics more to track how people are using the service to redirect traffic (RickRoll, anyone?), that he had a meeting in New York in February with the folks at bit.ly to most likely discuss a buyout, and that he may have plans for a new URL shortening service that would shorten TinyURL. And then he talked about his love of unicycling. I’m leaving out details, but only because it wasn’t the easiest Q&A to listen to, despite John’s and participants’ best attempts to get more out of Kevin. TinyUrl is a great service for any of you that have used it before, but I hope his business pitches to potential partners come across better than his Q&A. Interesting, but I hoped he would have opened up a little bit more.

Next was the introduction of The Wire. John led us through a quick Powerpoint showing the features of the new online interactive news community, showed a six-minute video they will use for potential advertisers, and finally a working demo.

The simplist way I can describe The Wire is that it combines a news service, comment section, and story updates all in one interactive timeline. It’s real-time, so as news or some other event is happening, people can keep up-to-date with the latest info. As a story becomes more popular in the community, it’s bubble grows bigger. People can move from story to story with a click of the mouse or by dragging the timeline side-to-side. You can zoom in-and-out, too, depending on how much of the day you wish to view in the timeline. You’ll b able to see the day before and the day after in normal view, but could also search for any three day period.

Maybe the coolest feature is that it won’t just be WCCO people posting updates, keeping others informed. Anyone will be able to post on a news story, as long as it keeps the story moving forward. And WCCO will track good ideas or tips, which could be used online elsewhere or on the air.

An example we discussed was the balloon boy fiasco from a couple weeks ago. Someone mentioned that after a while, it seemed that something was off about the story. Of course, later it came out that it was a hoax and that the family previously had been on Wife Swap and that they had been shopping a reality show idea for the family. If this story would have been live on The Wire, someone might have recognized the family from the show and posted video from their time on Wife Swap or a link to a story that they were shopping around the reality show. The Wire would, as John made clear, allow links to competing news media, if what was posted was relevant to the conversation.

There were some questions about how to keep misinformation out of the conversation. While they have some decisions to be made, he said that there would have to be some level of moderation, and that anything posted would be something they would stand by. He mentioned “talk with their lawyers” more than once, so I got the feeling that they are making an effort to not turn this into an open message board to which just anyone can post their feelings. There would be levels of contributors, most likely, so WCCO employees could probably post at any time, other users might be eventually be trusted to do the same, and that the general population would be the most moderated. I believe he said they’ve been moving Producers and Editors around in anticipation of the time needed to devote to the project once it goes live.

One of the first questions asked by a fellow attendee was about going mobile. It’s new, so there doesn’t seem to be anything in the works now. However, I would suggest they move on it quickly. I see The Wire being very useful on-the-go for people to stay informed, especially with local events and news. It seems people are so schizophrenic on the web, that I wonder how long people would stick to this one source when they have Facebook and Twitter to get back to. It will be great for getting a snapshot of what is going on at any given time, their goal will be for people to stay and contribute. For people at work, who usually don’t have great freedom to sit and surf the web from site to site, I think it could be a great one-stop news shop during the day. And for a nominal fee, companies, organizations, or venues will be able to advertise their events, which will appear in the timeline as well. I like that they have developed a couple different embeddable widgets for people to use, as well.

As mentioned, Laura and I both won door prizes. Laura won a very nice WCCO Television coffee mug. And I won what was probably considered the grand door prize, which is the opportunity to appear and be interviewed by Jason DeRusha on a future JasonCam on wcco.com. Jason does the very popular “Good Question” segments for WCCO news. We’ll have to figure out the time, and I’ll be sure to let you know when it is. I spoke briefly with Jason after the event and he seems easy to talk to, so it should be a fun conversation. Maybe I can get Siena and Elliot in front of his webcam to show off their dance moves if I freeze up.

These are my (not so brief) observations on the event. Overall, a good time. I was hoping to hear where others had come from to attend, but there were some very savvy social media folks in attendance who asked good questions to make John think about what final features to include in The Wire. I did find some attendees on Twitter who had wriiten about being there, too. I think we’ll go again (the Bloginars are held every 2-3 months). Maybe you’ll see one of us on the 6:00 news as another door prize winner

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* You can read Crystal’s adventures with food at Cafe Cyan and on WCCO’s Bite of MN food blog.
* Find out more about the Bloginar event by searching #bloginar on Twitter.
* And here’s another article about The Wire.