The Pontiff

Why is Chronicnews ? What is Chronicnews? May 16, 2006

This is the first of 4 posts regarding the Chronicnews network.

WHAT

Chronicnews is a network of locally focused websites powered by blogs. In other words they are mostly written by local bloggers — aggregated continuously via RSS and Atom (XML-RPC) and displayed more or less automatically on the pages.

The software system is designed to help rather than supplant human editorial judgements and actions. Its purpose is to free humans from the endless pains in the ass associated with publishing anything but poetically web publishing. After over a year of fairly intense screwing around (often called development) it works more or less without too many bugs or strange occurrences.

The focus is on the content producers or bloggers. We've two primary principals

• Create a rewarding environment for the content producers both in terms of recognition and remuneration. [NOTE: The next post will deal directly with the what and how of this.]
• Create a product and interface for the end user that is uncomplicated, comfortable and enjoyable.

WHY

We like to stay up late and need something to do for 16 hours every day of the week including holidays.

Okay we actually believe in this and want to share some quick visuals. These graphs were borrowed from Google Trends which has the nifty feature of allow you to compare search terms over a long term.

We start with the old standby to get a calibration.

Some things to note here. Good seems to be making a strong comback from its lackluster performance over the last 7 .. cough.. cough years.

Now that we have our baseline lets move on to something relevant — blogs vs. books.

Notice the steady decline in books and nearly equal climb in blogs. It seems that what books lose, blogs gain.

Next up is my favorite.

Notice how there is no relationship at all. However its interesting that people get horny around the holidays. Did you know that September and October are the biggest months for new babies? I'm making that up. But still its interesting to note that people seem to search what's on their minds and sex is always on their minds in one way or another.

Now for more in the department of no effect what so ever.

Abosolutely nothing to report here. TV has nothing to worrry about in the short term I suspect.

Before you think blogs are not really effecting the traditional media take a look at this.

Opps.. looks like Knight Rider got out while the getting was good.

Its that last slide that makes us think these blogs might be around for a while.
Technorati Tags: chronicnews Technorati Tags: local Technorati Tags: nashvillesnews.net Technorati Tags: local, content Technorati Tags: RSS

Technorati Tags: blog, trends