– Commenting
– MultiMedia Page — Mashups
– Local Election/Voting
– Mapping Devices (Time Map, Person Map View Construction)
– Interns to Populate DBase
– Automatic Admin or Content Read/Write via simple Wiki etc..
(All the baseline ingredients)
++ PLUS distrubutable widgetizing and Rev Share Model/CreditCard Transactional model ——
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* A comprehensive events calendar (with editorially selected “best bets”)
* Blogs by local residents
* Movie listings for local cinemas (with links to the reviews by both newspaper staff and members of the public)
* Detailed event coverage, including additional dates, weather forecasts for outdoor events in the next few days and an SMS/e-mail reminder service
* Gig listings that incorporate MP3 downloads (“if you go, you might hear”) from the 1,000+ MP3s of local bands hosted by the site
* Drink specials, which also appear on relevant event and venue pages
* The local band and music database, browseable by band, musician, genre and more
* The local restaurant listings, including kitchen hours (and hence the infamous restaurants open right now)
* The downloads page, which combines data from all over the site to present MP3s for download that are by bands which are playing gigs in the next week (“see ’em live at the Bottleneck”)
The point I was trying to make (one which I’ve seen Adrian Holovaty make many times) is that if you take good care of your data you can slice and dice it in dozens of unexpected ways.
Next up was LJWorld.com, which the team re-launched last month. The new site continues the trend of user comments on pretty much everything, and I demonstrated the funky new multimedia page which again illustrates the value of rich data models. The election results coverage and “Minors in possession” special report also got a mention.
The final site I talked about was Marketplace, the brand new business directory listing over 4,000 local companies. It can provide a map of all the chiropractors in town, along with their opening hours and contact details. Individual business listings can include events, photos, coupons, even video ads. Business owners can claim their listings and add more information to them; one restaurant uploaded photos of their entire menu.
I concluded with a few points on how you can go around building sites like this, including the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” development process and the importance of cheap labour (interns!) to reliably populating your database. I also threw in a plug for Django; the automatic admin interface was developed especially to support the fast pace of development at the Journal-World.
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Amul's Digital Life? 