Blog Heaven

WaPo's business staff just launched two more blogs, one called Small Business on washingtonpost.com and one on government contracting dubbed Government Inc. That brings to five the number of active bizzy blogs on the site, with tech guru Rob Pegoraro's popular Faster Forward and the tech staff's Post I.T. effort in the mix.

This is all part of the newspaper's effort to experiment with all sorts of online content. Over time, I'd like to distinquish the WashBiz Blog from the cookie-cutter blog template we are using since it is not really a blog in the classic sense. It's a more a newsy roundup. Which may mean we need to tinker with the name :)

Any ideas?

Our consumer blog and a jobs blog are on hiatus as the women who wrote them are currently on maternity leave. That raises another interesting issue...how to sustain these things when people are away. Or does that matter? My personal belief is that it is important to be consistent so readers have some expectation about what they are getting and can make reading the sites part of their routines. But, that said, perhaps online readers can be a forgiving bunch as long as they understand why things slow down.

What do you think?

Thinking About Multi-Media

How to measure success on the Web? It sounds like some folks are getting ready to change the definition. Nielsen NetRatings says it will scrap ratings based on page views in favor of time spent on a site. This is a nod to the YouTubes of the world, where people spent a lot of time watching video but don't necessarily flip through as many Web pages.

However, the story says the change hurts Google some because it sends people to other pages and helps AOL, which gets credit for instant message use.

Serving Readers, With A Side Of Promo

The WashBiz Blog is off and running and the initial response has been good, though I know you critics are out there ;). I started off with just a news-headlines approach to provide a base for the thing, but a few of our staff writers have begun to see how we can use the site to complement the stories we do in the paper, and get in print some of the stuff they know but which really isn't a fully formed story --- yet.

I've been spending some time each day attempting to hoover up all sites that supply local economic data around the region. As you can imagine, the data that is available is very uneven from county to county. Getting this all in one place should be a community service.

And that's what the blog is supposed to be---not a vanity project but a service to readers. Of course, part of that service is to tell readers all the good stuff in WaPo each day. So when it seems appropriate, I'll point to bizzy-related stories in other sections as a navigation aid to readers online and off.