an update on the 10 Melbourne local news sites
I publish 10 Melbourne local news sites that aggregate content from hundreds of local content creators. The sites have been live for several months and I now have sufficient data to chart their growth. Two sites are far larger that the rest: the Central Melbourne site recently passed 2000 posts and Fitzroy has over 1300.
The contributor numbers are not in proportion with the number of posts: Fitzroy has about 160 and Central Melbourne about 150. As I have defined it, Central Melbourne is a much larger area than Fitzroy and it has many organisational contributors who publish regularly to provide a great depth of information about life and events in the city. Fitzroy has fewer organisational contributors and more individual ones who post irregularly, but in terms of attracting a broad range of contributors, Fitzroy is the most blogged about suburb in Melbourne (and I hypothesise in all of Australia).
These sites are built from content syndicated from over 360 contributing sites. I have a spreadsheet of nearly 600 Melbourne sites, of which about 500 are currently active. I have already contacted the publishers of over 400 of the sites and am working to contact the rest. The difference between the 360 contributors and the 500 active sites indicates that there is far more content about local places currently available onine than is aggregated in the sites. If you publish content about local places and experiences, you are invited to contribute. You’re likely to increase your audience if you do.
Of the 600 sites on my list, about 340 are published using free hosting from Blogger.com, about 100 use free hosting from Wordpress.com and another 100 are self-hosted sites using the full version of Wordpress CMS available for free from Wordpress.org. A few sites use Drupal and Joomla, both of which can provide RSS feeds if configured to do so, but which usually don’t by default. A few people are using older blogging platforms like Typepad and Livejournal, or the new simpler tools like Tumblr, which do not provide the category, tag or label feeds used to build the local news sites.
The list of 600 sites includes very few static sites. Unless they have custom XML or RSS modules, static sites are now as useless as print publications. If you are the owner or publisher of a static website (defined as a site that does not use a content management system that delivers dynamic content) then you are probably losing audience members as you read this.
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Other posts you may find relevant and interesting
- the local newspapers of the future, 17 March 2009
- the best Melbourne local news and citizen journalism, 14 April 2009
- 10 local news sites in inner city Melbourne, 8 July 2009
- new local sites for Richmond and St Kilda, 8 June 2009
- how your Melbourne blog would benefit from location data, 7 September 2009