Live blogging from ONA CitMedia Workshop on 10/17

Here is the full information about the CitMedia sessions.

It is 10:10 and this is what is going on:

9:45 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.
Filling the Gaps in Local Coverage
# Urban Vancouver.com, Richard Eriksson, Founder
# H20Town and Placeblogger.com, Lisa Williams, Founder

I like "gardening" as a metaphor for tidying up the site, like cleaning up RSS feeds. Richard noted they were threatened with a libel suit and had to take content off their site so they could avoid legal charges. This is what Bob Cox of the Media Bloggers Association is addressing.

He has a blog aggregator for any bloggers in Vancouver. When they publish, they get a trackback and a link to the sidebar of the UrbanVancouver site, and thus they are syndicating the blogger content. Many readers are going to the site for the blogger syndication as much as for the main content.

Lisa Williams comments on the idea of "competition" and "competitors" -- lack of intense rivalry comes from the fact that the market isn't saturated. However, they don't take ads. Lisa used the model of UrbanVancouver.com where the bloggers are on equal footing with their content. Both of these sites are "labs" and they have made more money because of the site, rather than from the site.

Urbanvancouver is opensource and their software looks very good. UV is a "flagship" that shows off what their software can to. "Here's how you would build the site" using drupal and these modules and they set these sites up for others to make money. 30,000 uniques per month w/o ads, just on WOM.

Don't have a sales team and they are trying to make money indirectly -- they have made "some."