Here's an example of the map for San Francisco, CA:

In the legend above the map, you can specify which item you want to focus the map on (News only, Events only, etc.), or you can show all items at once. Each item on the map also links to more information.

Look for more additions to the maps in the coming weeks. In the meantime, drop us a line and let us know what you think.

Here's what one of the judges had to say about us, "Interesting site with a healthy amount of user generated content. Excellent and interesting cross navigation to engage the user further."

We were just honored by AlwaysOn, winning their award for the second year in a row. As they say, "At a time of economic uncertainty, the innovative business opportunities being created by the AO Global 250 winners couldn't be more welcome."

Tomorrow, Topix will be participating at BlogHer in San Francisco. Stop by our table for some goodies, a demo and a chat.

On August 6, Chris Tolles will be speaking on a panel at Digital Hollywood in San Jose: "HyperTargeting & HyperSelecting: Search, Content Aggregation and Advertising."

And in case you missed it, here's a conversation with Chris and Robert Scoble:

The "hat"
Overall, we've compressed and simplified the hat (the top part of every page that includes search, navigation, logo, etc). We also made a concentrated effort to improve the navigation, which is no small task considering we've got over 450,000 topics.

1. Promo bubble
We'll use this area to introduce and promote new features, as well as provide links to helpful information for Topix newbies.

2. Change city button
An easy-to-find widget that allows users to change the location for their local news.

3. Navigation
The top layer (in dark blue) is the general site-wide navigation, and the lower level (in light blue) shows the sections within that topic. So, for example, in this illustration, our top-level topic is "Palo Alto" and the sub-sections for it are Forums, News, NewsWire, Yellow Pages, Jobs, etc.

4. Editor button
A new position for the Editor button.

5. Other Topics
In addition to the general site-wide navigation, we're adding a drop-menu to called "Other Topics." We're going to use this menu to showcase more popular topics, as well as a dynamic list of the last 10 topics you visit on the site.

6. Browse/Search
A more prominent display and position for our Spotlight (browse)/search widget.

7. Sign In/Sign Out/User Info
New position for User info

2. More news
We've upped the count from 10 to 20 news stories on the News page.

3. New ad position
We gotta keep paying the bills...

4. Upgraded Forum Widget
A more prominent placement for the forum widget. Top-center, and now with double (10 instead of 5) threads showing.

5. Photo widget
If you're on a local news topic (Palo Alto, CA, for example) we're highlighting our new user uploaded photos. On other non-local topics, we're showcasing a nifty new photo slideshow widget that dynamically pulls in related photos.

The rest of the page widgets (polls, weather, etc.) are still on the page.

2. The Skybox
We love this feature. And so do a lot of you. So, as we were working on compressing the "hat," we realized that we just couldn't remove the Skybox. Instead, we're keeping it alive in the "Also on Topix" block, to show you the biggest stories in the news right now.

3. Recent Forum Discussions
The top ten most popular discussions across the entire site.

4. Video
Video news is becoming one of our more popular topics, so we're adding a new widget with links to our latest video clips.

5. Topix Extras
Not necessarily the news, but more about Topix, including our blog and our growing community of users and editors. Look for a link to the new Topix store coming soon.

6. News Trends
The topics getting the most attention by our users at that moment.

7. Most Popular
The 20 most popular stories on Topics.

In this new category, Topix ranks 7th, but a closer look reveals that three are roll-ups of parent companies (like Mama T). But when you compare Topix to stand-alone online brands – we shine in the Top 5:

In addition, last month, comScore pointed out that younger, non-newspaper print readers are very likely to visit Topix, observing,

“Non-newspaper readers are a particularly important segment to reach because they are heavier than average news consumers – they just prefer to consume it in a digital format.”

Combined, this data makes a strong case for Topix in the media mix.

In related media news, eMarketer talked with Topix CEO Chris Tolles about reaching local audiences online. And Tolles also spoke with Ad Age regarding the new influx of news aggregators in the market.

We just found out Topix is a finalist for CNET’s Webware 100 awards in the Search and Reference category. There are 300 finalists, but there will be only 100 winners –- and we need your help!

Please vote for Topix. They tell us you can vote for up to 3 finalists in each category. But, hey, why not vote just for Topix? And tell your friends to vote.

The winners will be announced on April 21, the day before the Web 2.0 Expo opens.

Kicking ass

While commenting functionality and forums are hardly new, the fact that we have systems to auto-moderate, spam detect and scale to handle 100,000 posts per day, with forum threads of tens of thousands of posts, is a pretty neat trick. I don’t know of any other place on the web where this volume of posting occurs with the kind of functionality we provide. This is a great testament to the architecture and implementation that our engineers have put in here.

One of the most interesting aspects of running a place where millions of people interact is that you can get a good running start with algorithms and automated systems, but at the end of the day, we’ve found having people to look at the corner cases is critical for a healthy system. And keeping everything from going off the rails has been handled superbly from the folks here doing community management.

Boo!

When journalists wring their hands and fret over anonymous commentary, or decry the presence of the masses linked to the pages of newspapers, it betrays their belief system – that only journalists can decide what is “news”, and that society is running off the rails with this …commentary...gaining traction.

The Internet empowers true many-to-many communication. It is *not* just another distribution medium for the products of broadcast media. Sure, it’s a great way to connect to people all over the world, and it’s been amazing at destroying the business model that paid for all of that content. But, really, the next step here is to empower everyone to talk to everyone else.

At Topix, we’re interested in giving people the ability to connect to other folks in their community, or community of interest. With over 100,000 comments a day coming in, and with participation from over 20,000 different communities every month, I think we’re on to something.

Relax

We’re all for helping publishers and the main stream media get in on this – and we’re providing commentary for all the Tribune publications, Media News, and LinTV & NBC’s television stations, amongst others. Lots of publishers already get it, and I’m excited to see that people are beginning to understand the inevitability of commentary connected to main stream media products.

There’s an important role for journalism and journalists here – to investigate and write stories, to fact check and provide a level of comprehensiveness that just isn’t the role of the commentariat to provide. But the Internet is empowering the average guy to put their opinion out there as well, and to engage with other people. And for my money, getting people to engage with each other is the big prize here.

The future is much more involved with engaging people to participate than it is in merely informing them of one point of view. I love my Sunday NY Times, and I love the local columnists in the SF Chronicle. But I really like the fact that the Chronicle beats the pants off of the NY Times in terms of giving their readers the ability to comment and engage with each other.

We’re excited to be powering that future – and with 100,000 posts per day, we’re really picking up some speed.

Gulp.

Silicon Valley CEO nightmare right out of central casting, right? In our case, Google launching a local news product that is targeted down to the ZIP code level, something we've had a lock on since 2004, and one of our clearest differentiators. There are lots of people who provide metro level "local" news, but we've been unique in being able to provide hyper-local news, and Google entering this space is certainly a big deal for us.

Fortunately, we had our wakeup call around local news a couple of years ago, and it wasn't the looming fear of Google launching local news which kept us up at night..it was something entirely different. Here's the dirty secret of doing aggregated news around local...

Local news is not a search problem

If you take the totality of news created from the mainstream press (newspapers, radio, television stations), and do the back of the napkin math for all the local stories generated on a daily basis, here's what you get

1,440 local daily papers X 6 stories a day = 8,640
2,303 news radio stations X 3 stories a day = 6,909
1,686 television stations X 4 stories a day = 6,744
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Total local stories per day 22,293
Number of populated US ZIP codes 32,500

We started by trying to add more sources. We added government, weather and industry sources, and then we added 25,000 blogs to the mix to see what we'd get. And, pretty much, they still didn't provide the breadth of coverage around local news, especially around small towns.

Don't like the news? Make some of your own!

The conclusion our users pointed us to, by sending us hundreds of stories a day through our feedback form, was that there wasn't enough coverage of most areas by the mainstream press or the blogsphere, and that the real opportunity was to become a place for people to publish commentary and stories -- because no one else was going to do it.

So, we launched the Topix forums, and two years and 25 million posts later, Topix has gone from being merely an aggregator of local news, to becoming the home of local voice on the web

60% of the "articles" on Topix are now "original", from scratch, posts not referring to a story
75% of the pageviews on Topix are on the commentary

So, with that shift, and those 25 million posts, we're actually a home for original content, and Google's main search engine is a great way to find that content. Also, for Google, there's a virtuous circle in sending people to places like the Topix forums -- some percentage of them end up participating and adding commentary, making the site better and "justifying" the algorithmical "decision" to send folks our way. We also added the ability for people to edit the news on Topix, and have over 3,500 editors. who are doing that on Topix so far.

Yes, it's always a concern when Google pops up on your patch. As Rich points out, we have great technology, more sources and four years of making this all work - but given the distribution that Google can bring to bear, what I'm really happy about is that we're more of a source, and therefore a natural partner to Google, than a sink for news searches and a competitor to them. Also, it doesn't hurt that the number one player on the web is validating that local is a place worth investment.

And, hey, Google -- if you ever decide that you'd like to add more content around localities (since we feel your pain around the lack of news in small towns), we have a couple of ideas for you...

UPDATE:

There was some great coverage of Topix after this came out.

Valleywag posted a nice OpEd that I wrote about competing with Google

John Battelle shows me why he's a world class editor with the title to his blog post being what I should have gone with

Webbalert gave us major props vs. Google as well, and a phat screenshot, which was cool

Webworkerdaily also had a good overview of the space, worth taking a look, as well

And, gotta love Informationweek's Thomas Claburn's referencing the pointy end of Rich's post.

Finally, got some props from Mike on our handling of things...

Anonymous commentary takes a beating within many of these editorials, with a lot of smoke but not much light in the way of data around the issues. So I figured it would be interesting to actually run some data on the quality of anonymous posting vs. registered users – as we have optional registration, and enough of both kinds of users to run an interesting sample on the posts that we killed on site.

Methodology and Assumptions

We have an AI based heat language detection based system to auto-moderate the posts prior to their being run, as well as a staff of human moderators which look over user flagged issues and handle complaints. Posts can be killed by either component to the system, and both are counted here.

This looks at one days worth of moderation on our posts. We could probably look to a larger sample, but this is probably a good representative sample

Topix registration requires an email confirmation, like most registration system, but most of the registered users started commenting anonymously, so the percentage of registered users is not comparable to a registration only system. Also, registered users aren’t authenticated to be rela people using their own names (which is representative of most registration systems).

The Data

Total posts: 83108 (visible: 78021)
Total by registered users: 22336
Total by non-registered: 60772

Posts killed: 5087
Posts by registered users that got killed: 992
Posts by unregistered users that got killed: 4095

% posts killed (overall): 5.1%
% posts killed (registered users): 4.4%
% posts killed (unregistered): 6.7%

Conclusions

While anonymous posts have a roughly 50% higher kill rate, they also account for 3X the comment and commenter volume. If one asks, “where are we getting the most acceptable comments from?”, the answer is clearly the non-registered user base. As pointed out above, that there are as many registered users on Topix is partially due to offering anonymous comments

Also, its important to note that the ability to manage “anonymous” commenters and “registered” commenters is equivalent from a moderation standpoint. It’s just as easy to identify someone by their IP address for the most part as it is through a registration system. While a 50% difference is certainly something to look at, it’s not an order of magnitude, and we’re also looking at a grand total of way under 10% of total commentary.

So, Where’s the Love?

You get much more in discourse, than you lose in “extra” banned commentary – so why the gnashing of editorial teeth over this issue? The “anonymous” issue is just a red herring. Really, what these journalists are threatened by is the nature of truly public discourse on the web. These people are not barbarians that appeared one day the net went up.

They’re your audience

Certainly, the editorial policy for the brand should be the decision of the folks that own that brand. That being said, systems that require registration get an order of magnitude less commentary than systems that don’t. If you have a human pre-screening every comment, you are going to spend a lot of money if you get any volume (which means you probably will constrain the volume), and if you do this by proxy by eliminating anonymous comments, what you’re really doing is just limiting the scalability of your system and keeping it small -- and you open yourself open to becoming displaced by someone with a more open editorial policy.

So, you can opt for not wanting to listen to what your audience wants to say, and keep most of them out of your brand. But looking at the numbers, eliminating anonymous comments is only going to limit the number of comments at the end of the day, not dramatically improve the quality of discourse on the web.

UPDATE: Howard Owens posts a response
UPDATE: Rich Skrenta and Scott Anderson from Tribune Interactive both have a couple of points to make

Also, I've been blown away at the number of people who I know that will be attending. I'm hoping to connect up to people at the Podtech Bloghaus, or at the "It won't Stay in Vegas" Party -- which is at, of all places, the Atomic Testing Museum.

With all of the attention of the world's tech press focused on Vegas this week, It will be interesting to see if there's any attention to spare for a local, non-gadget play like Topix -- but I guess we'll see.

We've gone live with several publications as part of our recent deal to provide forum technology to Media News Group. There has been some pretty good coverage of the deal - along with some questions about whether we're facilitating "outsourcing" community, from some quarters.

So, with that in mind, I was particularly pleased to see this article on the Lowell Sun Online:

Should hunting in the forest be banned? Readers speak out

This was one of our first integrations of a Media News Group newspaper - and this is a great example of the paper referencing the commentary to better connect to their communities, in this case a story about the people who commented on an article regarding local hunting. The initial article that generated the response can be found here, and the entire issue, which has been covered very well on the Sun, can be tracked with this search on Topix ('natch).

The Lowell Sun has been live with Topix commentary for a few weeks at most, so it's great to see them tapping into local voices, and providing some great additional coverage of the issue. The reverse publishing of some of the selected commentary is a particularly powerful way to boot up better engagement

On the other end of the scale, the Chicago Tribune's public editor Tim McNulty demonstartes that they're keeping tabs on what's going on within the commentary on the Chicago Tribune via a funny incident with "Ho ho ho" and our profanity filter. Also, some healthy debate about commentary seemed to find its way onto the comments around this article. (Tip of the hat to Scott Anderson for pointing this out).

Getting a high quality, web scale commentary system as a key part of your community play -- with a partner that will backstop your editors and give you a set of powerful tools to help boot up community in your area is something we think will add a lot of value to a newspaper, and a great first step in helping publications start putting some product meat to the desire to get community plugged into the news site.

And, we're not done yet, either. We think there's huge potential to do a lot more for local newspapers.

More news on that later.

1. a ghastly left-navigation

2. splitting our Search box into multiple panes

3. highlighting categories on search results pages

4. wiki-style inline links to related categories

5. guiding users into our comprehensive but unwieldy directory

But none of these ever really seemed to work well.

Until now.

Behold... "Spotlight Search"

Now appearing in the upper-left of every Topix page, you'll find a conventional looking search box that does the unthinkable: It actually helps you find categories of news.

Yes, we know it's crazy talk, but just give it a whirl and you'll see. The type-ahead functionality draws from a list of categories (as opposed to the "frequent searches" you'll find on other sites) and the breadth of exposure is pretty dramatic.

Start typing, and in as few as 3 characters you'll start getting deep-links to a lot of great edited & robo-blogged pages. Want to run a regular keyword search? Click the "Search" button and you'll be taken to the good-ol' index of most-recent results.

Hats off to "Skate-Rat" and "The Mage (+25)" for dreaming this impossible dream. ]]> 2007-10-16T22:31:22Z 2007-10-16T15:15:09-08:00 tag:blog.topix.net,2007://1.177 2007-10-16T22:15:09Z

Thousands of Topics x Hundreds of News Stories x Hundreds of Forum Discussions = A Lot of Content Every Day

But what's the best stuff on Topix? Until now, its been hard (even for us) to pinpoint the latest and greatest across the site. The new "Top Picks" feature is helping change that. Starting today, at the top of all our pages, you'll find three columns of hand-picked goodness. From breaking news to Britney Spears, we’re putting it all just a single click away.

Polls

Star Wars or Star Trek?

How much is too much for a cup of coffee: $1? $2? $5?

These burning questions, and many, many more will be asked and answered in the new Topix Polls. You can find all the hottest polls here, and don't forget to look for the "Featured Poll" on your favorite topic pages.

Oh, did I forget to mention that you can create your own polls? Right now? About anything you want? You can.

Weather & Traffic

Local News & Talk without Weather & Traffic is like a car without seats. Sure, it's possible -- but it's just not right. We added seats (okay, Weather & Traffic) to your Local page. Now you don’t have an excuse for getting caught in traffic without your umbrella... or car seats.