Questions off the News

The joy about having a community on the site is when you ask a question, you'll get a response. I'll be interested to see how this one does: What would you do with $700 billion dollars?

Shameless Plug, D360 and a Link

A shameless plug about getting d360 content on other Web sites. The more the merrier is my philosophy. Here's the latest link. Enjoy.

D360, Rule Breaking and Online Communities

Interesting story about our site today written by Richard Millington, who is a builder of online communities. Millington is from the United Kingdom. Given I drove around Ohio for several years (as a top editor at a newspaper no less) with a license plate that read, "B Unruly," I figured his blog -- about breaking rules to succeed online -- was worth a mention.

OMMA, Reference Web Sites and Good News

What do Babycenter.com, howstuffworks.com and d360 have in common?

Click here and look under finalists -- reference sites...

I have to say we're in great company!

On a Roll with Content Partnerships

Sometimes good stuff slips into our days and goes unnoticed until we wake up, mid-week from editing a bunch of stories and realize, wow, a sweeeet thang happened while I was buried under that pile. As a former print editor turned editor of an Internet startup, my translation of sweeeet thang would be:

1. Two days of having the same story on the msn.com home page.

2. And two days of two different stories on Woman's Day.

I guess it goes to show that some rules don't change, regardless of medium. Simply put, good content works.

Twitter, D360 and networking the news

I admit it. I'm a Twitter fan. It didn't happen overnight. It's been a long, slow courtship.

I know social networking has journalistic applications, but I wasn’t quite certain how this particular site would help. It's taken months and a breaking news story to help me really understand.

Twitter, if you don’t already know, is a social networking site that allows only brief posts – about the size of your average newspaper headline. So having a good editor -- or being one – is helpful to get the best use of the space.

Our marketing vice president at d360, Paula Sirois, twisted my arm into jumping on the Twitter bandwagon after a year of tweet-ing away about our Internet startup. I've been tweeting routinely since she helped me hook up.

A few weeks ago, late on a Friday afternoon, ABC announced that former presidential candidate John Edwards had admitted he had a brief affair with a film producer. Given that our site has an archive of stories about the topic of infidelity, I was able to put together a story quickly and post it online within minutes of the annoucement.

Then I posted a quote from the story on Twitter, which is what I normally do for newly published stories. I wondered if I could drum up any interest in our d360 experts and related stories by posting them on Twitter as well. So I tried it.

Shortly after doing so I received a post from a journalist who wanted to congratulate me for being on top of the news and for providing related topics of interest to the main story. The e-mail that followed came from an editor at an online news wire service called All Headline News, who asked if I could provide experts for the Edwards story. Of course, I could – and did.

As a traditional print editor, I never thought about using a social networking site to expand our web site’s reach. But a year after taking this job, I have used Twitter – and other social networking sites – to increase my sourcelist, expand my web contacts and come up with related content to breaking news.

More importantly, I’ve used social networking to connect the content we’ve gathered with media outlets that need it. I guess it goes to show you – it is all about who you know.

D360 Partners with Woman's Day

The Holy Grail of Internet startups -- partnerships with other web sites.

How does it work? You provide content, which they pick up and use on their site. And then they give you links and credit, which drives more traffic to your site.

So far, our content has been featured on msn, AOL, so many newspapers and their web sites that I've long since lost count. And a year after eight months after we launched, we added one more partner to our list: Woman's Day.

Today, Woman's Day relaunched its site with a new design -- and some content from us. Enjoy.

http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/Relationships/7-Ways-to-Move-On-After-a-Divorce.html

http://www.womansday.com/Articles/Family-Lifestyle/Relationships/How-Talking-Helps-Marriage.html