Even though signonsandiego.com has seen changes throughout the years, at least one thing has remained a constant: Jim Drummond, an editor for The San Diego Union-Tribune, started the site in November 1995 and remains with the company today as a director of business development.

Signonsandiego.com was originally located in the offices of The Union-Tribune, but in December 1998 it was spun off as a new venture with its own profit and loss and took up separate offices. The original URL, uniontrib.com, was changed to signonsandieg.com, also known as sosd.com.

At the time of the spin-off, the site was changed into more of a city guide product, in vogue at the time.

“That partnership with CitySearch (a company owned by Ticketmaster) continues, although now it’s not primarily a city guide,” said Chris Jennewein, director of Internet operations.

All of the division heads at The Union-Tribune are directors. Jennewein reports to the chief executive officer and sits on the executive committee. When he took over roughly a year and a half ago, he chose to change the online strategy from that of a city guide to that of breaking news, updated as often as technically and humanly possible. The first week after Jennewein came aboard, the site was being updated once or sometimes twice per day. When the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks occurred, the site switched to a much more rapidly-updated format. Continuous updates have been a staple ever since.

“We have 10-minute updates throughout the day, with the help of The Associated Press and then we completely change the home page every two to three hours,” Jennewein said. “What we’re trying to do is reach the ‘business-day’ market in San Diego and in fact become the No. 1 Web site in the market.”

Jennewein sees radio and television as the site’s day-to-day competition, especially in the high-speed office environment. It may be difficult in that situation to turn on a radio or television, but checking on news with a few mouse clicks is much easier.

According to Lindsay Verity, The Union-Tribune’s Internet marketing manager, the site receives news content from the paper via a publishing system from System Integrators Inc.

Once content is received, it’s processed by a series of Perl scripts to convert it to HTML. Breaking news is updated constantly, whereas the core of the content and features for the next day are updated once a day, at 2 a.m., early enough for East Coast readers.

Within the next month, sosd.com will launch a new content-management system, developed internally using Zope and Python technologies, which will eliminate the script conversion process. Currently the system is used for archives, AP headlines and classifieds.

“We hope that within the next nine months this system will power the majority of sosd’s content,” Verity said.

Advertising runs the gamut from the traditional online-format ads to the rich media types that are increasingly gaining traction.

“Some of the more successful advertising sales initiatives have been skyscrapers, rich media advertising and sponsorships,” said Verity. “Most of our advertising is sold on set pricing for skyscrapers and sponsorships. This has been successful as opposed to following a CPM (cost per thousand impressions) approach. However, because of our large page view inventory, we still sell banners and tiles on a CPM model.”

Jennewein is pleased to have a site that a viewer can visit every hour and see significant changes, with constantly evolving fresh content. Year-over-year traffic is up an average 50 percent to 60 percent on a monthly basis, and that level of growth has been maintained for the last 18 months.

The site recently completed a partnership with Cox Communications so that sosd.com is the home page for new users of the cable modem broadband service. That has had a significant impact on site traffic on nights and weekends, since most Cox traffic comes from home users. The Cox network recently became the No. 1 source of referral traffic to the site, ahead of Google and Yahoo!.