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 Dec.
 2004







 Traction Software
401.528.1145
www.tractionsoftware.com

 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 

 

 


 

 

 

 

 

 

 


 



 

 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution blogging its way to sports success

By Hays Goodman
Associate Editor

Few would argue that blogging hasn’t made a tremendous impact on mainstream journalism.

Even before the November elections, columnists from a wide variety of daily newspapers were establishing their own online blogs. On Nov. 2, dozens of newspapers, including the Chicago Tribune and Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, prominently featured their blogs on the front page of their respective Web sites.

Blogging’s chronological format lends itself well to continuing stories, and the easy interface behind most blogs lets technology-averse reporters and editors make their own entries without requiring them to be expert users of sophisticated content management apps.

So it’s no surprise that blogs have showed up in other departments of the newspaper.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Monday-Thursday, 389,580; Friday, 447,067; Saturday, 453,849; Sunday, 629,505) March 31 launched a sports-related blog, using Traction Software Inc.’s TeamPage app.

“It’s really become almost part of the standard operating procedure for writers to participate in the online commenting that those types of columns generate,” said Hyde Post, the newspaper’s editorial director. “They’ll put a column up and from time to time weigh in, or start a new discussion entirely.”

The sports blogs became so popular that, The Journal-Constitution moved them, along with most of its sports columnists, from the free section of its Web site to the subscriber-only portion of the site. The daily charges $29.95 per year to access the premium content; print subscribers pay $15.

So far, most of the columnists haven’t found the blogs to be overly burdensome, Post said. Some, such as Jeff Schultz, have capitalized on the immediate public feedback blogging affords.

 

Balancing a three-legged stool

Despite challenges for the technical team in integrating the free side and the subscription site, Post said TeamPage has been extremely stable and reliable since its setup. The Journal-Constitution hosts its free content at servers based at parent Cox Communications, while the paid side is hosted at service provider Rackspace.com. Tying these multiple sites together, along with an e-commerce engine, was akin to balancing a three-legged stool, one leg at a time, Post said.

“We wanted a blogging partner that was comfortable in a paid sort of universe,” Post said of Traction.

“That meant experience hooking up to e-commerce engines and a familiarity with our kind of semi-permeable site where some content is free but most of it is behind the paid wall.”

Traction gains traction

Traction Software Inc.’s TeamPage typifies the advantages blogging software offers: It’s 100 percent Java and runs on a variety of popular server operating systems including Windows, Linux, Solaris and Macintosh OS X. It doesn’t require a costly external relational database, as it stores blog content as a series of indexed flat files.

The app is also extensively customizable. Look and feel can be based on Traction-supplied templates or the software can be retooled to meet the customer’s needs.

Tools for developing new skins include cascading style sheets and Traction’s skin definition language, or SDL. Internal functional customization is performed using really simple syndication, RSS 2.0, XML-RPC and the SOAP. For authentication, it can use its own internal list or it can also integrate with a Windows Active Directory or an LDAP (light directory access protocol) method.

Traction’s experience with hypertext - text that contains links to other documents - dates back to before Apple Computer Inc. included HyperCard as an app programmers could use to create linked text.

Programmers then were eager to move beyond simple linking. What emerged was “intelligent” linking, where words were married depending upon the context with which they were used.

According to Traction president and co-founder Greg Lloyd, this sort of background led naturally into how text interrelates in blogging applications.

“A lot of what bloggers are looking for we call induction,” Lloyd said. “What this means is how the user is able to get information into their application. Is it strictly typing, cut-and-paste, or can they also import a Word document or update the blog by sending an e-mail through Outlook?”

In addition to supporting a conventional blog, TeamShare can also be used as a corporate collaborative app. Team-based blogging, said Lloyd, can bypass a lot of the usual “smoke and fog” associated with large groups of people working on complex projects.

To that end, TeamPage also includes a dedicated client app that can run outside of a Web browser. The app, Traction Instant Publisher, lets the user drag-and-drop Windows desktop content, screenshots and attachments, which will appear as optional elements in a blog entry that others can click to download.

- Hays Goodman