Tuesday, April 22, 2008

mytowncolorado.com The Boulder (CO) Daily Camera has converted its community site MyTown to a Ning.com social network. Good move?

For the past couple of years my local daily paper, the Boulder (Colo.) Daily Camera, has been running a site called MyTown where local people can contribute their stories and photos and host blogs.

Recently, the Camera has decided to relaunch MyTown on the free social network service Ning.com. You can see it now at a new domain, mytowncolorado.com. An announcement on the new site tells users of the old site, "We are going to leave the old MyTown site up until May 23 in case you want to grab anything from there."

As of this writing, I could find no announcement on the original MyTown site (which is still active, and open to new registrations and posts) that the site will be moving and old content will not be transferred by the Camera. I suspect the news might come as a shock to some users.

Camera staffer Matt Flood, who heads this project, explained the move: "We are moving away from the old MyTown application because there were issues with it and the developer that built it is no longer with the company so we couldn't fix anything or create anything new. ...There is no easy way to move any of the old content over to the new site."

I'm not surprised that the Camera, like many media organizations, ran into serious maintenance problems with a custom-built content management system. Any CMS must operate in a constantly shifting landscape, and it's much harder and less efficient to keep one-off systems up to date than popular commercial or open-source platforms.

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I've seen several custom CMSs in operation -- and frankly, they almost invariably end up falling behind and getting scrapped. (The main reason I've stopped using another community site supported by a news org, YourHub, is because its CMS was unbearably buggy and cumbersome.) When it comes to your CMS, it just doesn't pay to reinvent the wheel.

Fellow Tidbits contributor Tish Grier notes, "The Camera staff's problem with the MyTown development staff is something that happens with projects. There aren't enough good designers and competent developers, so developers move around a lot (I've found this with Drupal developers, who are in high demand.) Whether the product is proprietary or open source, losing a trusted developer is like getting hit in the stomach. I don't know if the solution is to do-it-yourself, or go to the web as with Ning. Web-based applications are sometimes only a half-solution."

I can see several possible pros and cons of the Camera moving MyTown to Ning.com:

Pros:

• More manageable with limited resources. No need to update software, pay for hosting, or worry (much) about security or server administration.
• More and better community features. As both a former user of the original MyTown and a current user of Ning, I know that this move will give the Camera a better chance to foster an online community. At least, they'll have tools that are more suited to the job.
• Better distribution for feeds. Ning offers a wide array of RSS feeds from its sites, which can make it much easier to drive traffic and visibility through both aggregators and search engines.
• Content rights. Unlike several free blogging and social media platforms, Ning's terms of service says, "Ning does not claim any ownership rights in the Content or the Code you provide."
• Advertising opportunities. Ning sites do run ads. By default, Ning's own Google Adsense ads run on Ning sites -- but with the purchase of Ning's premium service ($19.95/month) these can be removed and replaced with other advertising options. So there's at least the possibility of some direct revenue.

Cons:

• Lack of branding. The current Ning.com site bears almost no Daily Camera branding (just a few subtle mentions in the sidebar), and so far the Camera site offers no links to it. Separating this project from the Camera's strong local brand puts it at a conspicuous disadvantage.
• Layout and usability limitations. Ning is a versatile platform, but it's definitely not pretty or slick. So far, it offers few options to customize layout, and it can be difficult for newcomers to figure out how to browse and use a Ning site. However, I hear there's a pretty active Ning developer community, so maybe improvements on this front are forthcoming.
• Making traffic count. While it's possible to integrate third-party tools such as Google Analytics to measure and analyze traffic to a Ning site, it might be difficult to convince advertisers of the value of advertising on those sites -- especially if they're separated by both branding and domain from the news org's main site.
• Trusting the host. Whenever you use a hosted service, you're relying on them to be competent, ethical, and responsible. There's always a risk that the service could fold or be sold, change its terms, institute unattractive pricing schemes down the line, get hacked or sabotaged, etc. I hope the Camera has arranged for independent archiving of their site code and content, in case they need to move away from Ning later.
  
• What message does using a free service send? The move to Ning could easily make the Camera look cheap.

I'm troubled that the Camera is not moving the old content to the new site. I hope that archive will at least be stored in a way that can be integrated with the Ning site's search engine (something they may be able to accomplish with a customizable search tool like Lijit or Google Custom Search). The existing body of MyTown content not only represents potential search engine traffic -- it also represents the labor of community volunteers. To trash that labor sends the wrong message to potential contributors, I think.

In hindsight, it might have been better for the Camera to start MyTown using a Ning-like service in order to build community, and then expand from there as warranted, rather than starting with a custom tool. But I do think that news orgs (especially those facing fiscal pressures -- which is almost all of them) can benefit from using existing social media tools, services, and platforms to engage their communities.

(Thanks to Dave Burdick for the tip.)

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