ANOTHER entertaining meeting of the Digital Editors' Network took place in Preston with plenty of thoughts and ideas zipping around the room at the University of Central Lancashire.
First up was Simon Wharton, of PushOn, who provided an insight into what search engines are looking for on websites and if followed how they can help newspaper stories rank well for search requests.
His presentation can be downloaded from his site, but briefly he stressed the importance of pages having title tags, only this weekend I noticed a national newspaper didn't have a title tag on one of its stories, as well as ensuring page addresses are clean and tidy, so not too many database strings and code numbers.
The second talk was provided by Mark Comerford, new media lecuturer at Stockholm University, who explained the success behind such sites as expressen.se and aftonbladet.se, which he stressed in his own inimitable style were making "shedloads of money".
He highlighted a recent report into the Swedish blogosphere that blew away the belief that blogs are home to young teenage boys writing about sport, cars and girls.
In fact it was very much the reverse with teenage girls and young women the most heavily involved in creating blogs, as well as taking part in many online communities.
And I think a few people began to realise that their sites aren't competing against other news organisations, they are up against the fact that there are only 24 hours in the day.
So unless you are able to create your own Facebook, MySpace, YouTube or Digg then you have got to look at where your existing and potential audience is gathering to try and increase your share of those 24 hours.
You can do this on your own website by providing bookmarking options on articles, or look to really help those already out in these communities to place your work in front of their friends and colleagues.
Just some of the simple ways to do this are to let people feature photographs from your Flickr account on their own pages; enable videos you upload to YouTube to be embedded across the web; keep an up to date del.iciou.us page of useful bookmarks pointing to local websites.
Or, thanks to the power of RSS, let people display section headlines on their Facebook page, for example, stories from the local football team will see your work being placed in front of many others.
I suppose there is a third way and despite newspaper bosses being very good at getting much out of practically nothing, even they will struggle to squeeze more than 24 hours out of a day.
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