Sorry about my sudden and unannounced absence from blogging. Here's what happened.

My hosting provider, GoDaddy, called me with a supposed great deal that would reduce monthly costs. Of course, they guaranteed that switching to this new hosting plan wouldn't affect anything whatsoever, so I agreed.

And, of course, they were wrong.

After talking with Movable Type support, we narrowed down the problem to GoDaddy having turned off CGI support, which made it impossible to edit the blog. All this happened amid my brother's wedding and a big redesign project at work, so I didn't have loads of time to troubleshoot.

Bottomline: After talking with GoDaddy support again and cycling through some changes, I'm back. Got a lot to post. So get ready.

Now anyone can put the IBISEYE hurricane tracker on their own Web site. Charlie Szymanski created a nifty widget that should hopefully help spread the word while offering a useful service.

When there are no named storms brewing, the widget shows "points of interest," which can be waves, areas, or points. Tropical waves are the ones to watch out for because they're most likely to become depressions, etc.

If a named storm emerges, the widget immediately changes its display to show the latest forecast path for that storm. This is a quick way to keep your users updated on the latest official storm track. And because the widget lets you customize what it shows, it's often better than just offering an ugly graphic from a government site.

To start using the widget, just paste this iframe into your site's code:

<iframe src="http://www.ibiseye.com/widget.aspx?height=500&width;=500⪫=27.36&lng;=-82.5&zoom;=3" width="500" height="500"
scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" hspace="0" vspace="0" marginheight="0" marginwidth="0"
></iframe>

To customize your display, adjust the URL within the iframe with these settings:

Width: Sets the width of the widget. Be sure to also set this within the IFrame tag itself. They should be the same. Minimum is 250.

Height: Sets the height of the widget. Be sure to also set this within the IFrame tag itself. They should be the same. Minimum is 250.

NoOverlay To turn off the Satellite view, add this parameter to the iframe source attribute: &nooverlay;=true

Lat: This is the latitude at which the map centers. Default is over Florida – 27.36…

Lng: This is the longitude at which the map centers. Default is over Florida -- -82.5…

Zoom: This is the map zoom level. It defaults to 3. Range is from 1 to 17, with 17 being the most zoomed in.

Lat and Lng must be set together. You cannot have one without the other. Zoom, however, can be set without a lat and a lng, or with them.

The final product should look like this:

Susan Karol of the Suburban Newspaper Association presented a study about what makes the best community Web sites during the EPpy convention. Oddly enough, the study showed that the best of the best are well known among their users for something so common, so basic, it’s often overlooked in online journalism – breaking news.

In their study, conducted in conjunction with Belden, more than 8,500 people were interviewed across 16 states, in 21 different media markets. Users were asked what they want from a community Web site.

Sixty-five percent of respondents said constant updates are “very useful.” That’s important because the study also found that the more utilitarian the site was perceived to be, the more successful it was in attracting readers.

What about social networking? Nifty calendars? Blogs that users can set up on their own, groups to join, user-submitted content?

None of this disregards the usefulness of whiz-bang tools. But it does help prioritize the way these tools are presented. If constant updates are most important to users, then showing the newest user profiles, latest calendar events and blog entries, etc. could make a difference in the minds of users.

With the success of the first WickedLocal.com site, Gatehouse is moving to spread the site to many of its uber-tiny newspaper markets. One of the first experiments in this was WickedLocalPlymouth.com.

Before everyone gets excited about the prospect of creating a wicked huge online brand for local search, let’s remember the failures of Backfence.com. It attempted to unite micro-local coverage under a macro brand, inherently making its sites feel like strangers in a small town. Few people ever used the sites.

Will the same fate befall Wicked Local Everywhere?

It would, except that Gatehouse is shutting down newspaper Web sites and replacing them with Wicked Local branding. For example, WickedLocalPlymouth.com replaced the Web site for the Old Colony Memorial newspaper. Gatehouse calls Plymouth the beta site for a network of Wicked Locals it will launch in more than 100 towns throughout eastern Massachusetts.

The newspaper is the most local brand in town, and its online presence, no matter what the name, will always be considered local.

Still, this begs the marketing question: Does it make sense to print a newspaper with a completely different name than its Web site? Gatehouse would get a lot better bang for its branding effort if it renamed the newspapers, as well.

I totally forgot to talk about the heated showdown between Amy Gahran of Poynter and an NBC vice president. It happened during a Q&A; at the EPpy convention.

Keynote speaker Mark Lukasiewicz, who is vice president for Digital Media at NBC News, had told the audience that citizen journalism will never replace mainstream media. And then the fateful words: “A witness is different than a journalist.”

That must have sent self-proclaimed “info-provocateur” Gahran fidgeting in her seat with fury. She was the first to stand, mic in hand, to ask a “question.”

Gahran took an accusatory tone and laid into the VP. “Why do you perceive citizen journalists as inherently inferior or a threat?” she asked without pausing to let him answer. She complained of a, “perception that journalists are a priesthood.”

The VP somewhat calmly responded, starting with the accidentally condescending phrase, “Let’s understand what journalism is . . .” He said the citizen journalism movement shouldn’t be called journalism because it devalues real reporting.

Gahran fired back. And I do mean fire. She said a lot of NBC’s own reporters act more like witnesses than analytical journalists. They just stand there in front of a scene and tell viewers what’s happening behind them, offering no insight because the facts are still unfolding. How’s that different from bloggers telling what they see? (Her question, not mine.)

There was no diplomatic resolution here. Gahran made her point, and the VP didn’t agree that citizen journalists are anywhere on par with real reporters. In a world of user-submitted video, he said, there will still be demand for the likes of Steven Spielberg because he knows how to tell a quality story.

Fellow New York Times Co. employees won Yahoo Hack Day London 2007. Check out their cool method for using a mobile phone to bookmark headlines that you'll read later when near your computer.

I'd love to see them get that external chip thing built right into the computer. Then, it's easier to carry around with a laptop.

Do you all know of any TV station that lets users mash-up its news stories into a "broadcast" of their own? Someone must be doing this, but I can't find it anywhere.

Syndicates let local TV stations "mash-up" their content on a daily basis. The AP sends the station videos each day and anchors write their own intros. Sometimes the packages are "localized" as a voiceover, removing the presence of the AP reporter.

So that's my idea: Let users do the same thing with our stories. Require that they post their mashed-up versions only onto our own Web sites, though.

The result could be the breakthrough needed to create more third-niche content. That's content that people watch as much for the news as for the personality presenting the news.

There’s always one reporter who wants to know why he or she isn’t getting paid more to do all this “extra” work, from reporting on TV to blogging, etc. Usually the reporter’s complaint is quickly dismissed. But someone apparently listened.

Josh Quittner, editor for Business 2.0, first told all of his reporters that they’re required to write a blog related to their beats. Then, he committed to pay them more to do it. Here’s how it works.

Quittner, who shared this idea during the EPpy conference, tracks the number of page views generated by each reporter’s blog and pays them a “commission” of sorts. To keep the math simple, let’s say a blog has earned 10,000 page views this month. With a $2 CPM commission, that reporter just earned $20.

Of course, Quittner is selling the page views to advertisers at a much higher CPM.

And by focusing the reporter on the number of page views generated by content, it creates more effective content. Inevitably, the reporter learns that the more frequently items are posted, the more page views they earn. Before you know it, the site is filled with mini-stories it didn’t have before.

Quittner said Business 2.0 got 1.5 million new page views per month this way. The reader wins, the reporter wins, and the publication wins.

For those of you who missed it, here's a good discussion about Sam Zell's plan to take the Tribune Co. private and whether other media companies should follow suit.

I've been saying, for a long while, that going private is at least one way to weather the transition to an Internet-focused business model.

Folks on “Reliable Sources” today with Howard Kurtz took turns bashing reputable news outlets for covering Paris Hilton. And, I’m sick of it.

It’s this redundantly pompous reaction to pop culture that helps destroy journalism. Newspapers and television are mass mediums. That means success requires attracting lots of people. Pop culture is what those people have in common.

Calling your audience’s culture dumb is the same as calling your audience dumb. That’s not going to win any viewers. So, shut up already.

Journalists don’t get to decide what’s important. If you haven’t realized that yet, then I’m sorry to have to break it to you. The people decide.

Journalism is a service. Cover what the ratings tell you to cover. Promote what the stats say works. Because they’re not just numbers; those are votes. Ignoring the votes means people will change the channel, or newspaper, or magazine, etc.

If you do a good enough job listening to your viewers or readers, then they let you pick a few stories. They want you to cover the less dramatic, but seriously important. But the agreement, and it is an agreement, is that you first cover what they want.

Instead of letting these stories devolve into sessions of self-loathing, journalists should cover these soap operas better. (That shouldn’t be difficult: MSNBC actually put famed pothead Tommy Chong on the air to analyze the Paris Hilton sentence.)

Law & Order has long been one of the most popular shows on television. Boston Legal is watched by millions. They’re successful, in part, because entire story lines are “ripped from the headlines.”

WWOD? What would Oprah do? She’s rich for a reason. The thing people forget about Oprah is she’s a journalist at her roots.

On her show, expect to hear from the kids who idolize Paris. How do their parents deal with that? She’d find the person whose family was killed by an intoxicated driver to illustrate the consequences of Paris’ actions. Maybe we’d talk with a psychologist about how growing up rich affects a person’s view of the world. Then talk to a rich person who went to jail about how it changed them. I could go on and on.

But the media can’t. All they can do is report the latest thing to have happened, so they report the same tidbit 10,000 times and ask talking heads for their vapid reactions. Thoughtless coverage is killing journalism.

Stop deploring what the people want. Stop being annoyed by your audience. Start listening, and then start actually thinking up some worthwhile ways to cover these stories.

In the aftermath of the Paris Hilton interview, Anderson Cooper (who had refused to speak Paris' name on air) and his guest analyst Marc Lamont Hill say basically what I said in my last post.

Then, Anderson goes on to do exactly what cable news shouldn't: Talk about Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton, Paris Hilton. And nothing else. The professor is right: There are better stories within this story.

To be fair, this show aired directly following Larry King's interview, so it was the appropriate place to emphasize reaction to the interview. And the rest of the show included sidebars about Paris' plight.

KnoxNews.com launched its new design with one important change: You don’t have to register to use it.

Remember when everyone got all excited about the prospect of knowing exactly who uses their Web sites? Maybe it will help lure advertisers, they hoped. Well, it didn’t.

It’s about time the industry faced reality: Registration doesn’t work. The information gathered is largely a database of lies. Why would anyone enter their real name, age or anything? Most users fill out crap so they can arrive at the story they wanted to read as quickly as possible.

Newspaper executives expected to use registration data as a replacement to professional market research, though few will admit it.

Registration data is only useful to us when it’s also useful to the user. When I want to personalize my weather, I’ll give you my real zip code. When I want to receive an e-mail newsletter, I’ll provide an e-mail address. But few people give away accurate personal information out of the goodness of their hearts.

Somehow Yahoo and Google and other gigantic successes manage to make truckloads of money without requiring users to share their life stories. My guess is KnoxNews came to this conclusion and scrapped registration altogether.

Common sense tells me page views will increase as a result of dropping a barrier to viewing content. And, page views actually make money.

It would be easy to see the shutdown of CNN’s Pipeline video service as just another piece of evidence that people won’t pay for content online. But that’s not why the Pipeline failed.

After all, there are lots of types of online content that people pay for already. WSJ.com is an example; Rhapsody.com is an example; ConsumerReports.org is an example. The problem wasn’t the paid model: the problem was the content.

CNN assumed that it could give away text versions of stories for free but ask people to pay to see what happened. When put that way, doesn’t it sound like a bad business model from the start? It’s especially bad because the video can be seen for free just by turning on your TV set.

I think all news content should be free, but I don’t agree that it must be free. If content is 100 percent original to the Web, then inevitably there will be an audience willing to pay for it. The question is whether you’re satisfied with number of people willing to pay.

Take for example, GoVolsXtra.com (run by KnoxNews.com). Tennessee Vols fans were required to pay for coverage of their favorite teams. But the paid wall just came down. Here’s what Editor Jack McElroy said about the change:

We knew that interest in the Vols was intense and, if we could build a special site dedicated to that passion, some folks would be happy to subscribe.

We were right. Several thousand did, and the success of the site allowed us to expand the size of our Sports staff, which, in turn, improved the content of our printed news pages.

But now online advertising is a booming business, and we believe that building as large an audience as possible is the ticket to long-term success.

If you’re planning to launch a new site of original content and have no staff to sell advertising (and Google ads won’t generate enough money because the site’s page views are in their infancy), then by all means charge users to view the content. But at some point, follow the lead of GoVolsXtra.

Kudos to GoVolsExtra for knowing when the right time arrived.

Pipeline, however, never should have charged for content that wasn’t original to the Web. They could have easily used the resources of CNN.com to sell video advertising from the upstart.