Thanks Readers

John Frenaye | November 5, 2009 at 5:12 am

Once again, our continued growth is impressive and humbling at the same time. Obviously we are hitting a note with readers interested in Anne Arundel County and our advertisers are seeing the benefit of nearly 52,000 ad impressions last month alone! We are targeted to grow another 39% this month with almost 20,000 visitors and 60,000 impressions. Thank you all!

eyestatsoctober

Meet John Frenaye

John Frenaye has written 1788 posts in this blog.

John is the publisher and editor of Eye On Annapolis. As a resident and business owner in Anne Arundel County for more than 15 years, he realized that there was something missing in terms of community news--and Eye On Annapolis was born in late spring 2009. John's background is in the travel industry as a business owner, industry speaker, and travel writer. In terms of blogging and social media, he cut his teeth with MSNBC.com.

Category: BLOG NOTES

Paul A. Richards

Maybe there will be a 39% increase in traffic. But, WHY?

The election prompted me to look.

This site does not get enough comments to be much fun. Alas, another Blog gets far too much trash comments, all Anonymous. A third Blog hinders comments, but at least he tries to be controversial. Maybe we need a Fourth Blog — get rid of the current ones. Make it a useful forum —
1. postings by as moderator that are relevant and mostly unique. [some links to other Blogs & newspapers, etc. is good, but A blog should not only be an index.
2. Comments that are properly moderated. No Anonymous postings. All postings must be “open” with the poster’s real name or “semi-open” with the poster (a) indicating some details, such as address city and/or political affiliation, etc. Semi-open posters must reveal their ID to the moderator, confidentially.
3. Threads should be tagged and can be followed for the past 3 months, only.
4. what else ????

There must be a useful middle ground.
http://www.eyeonannapolis.net Eye Spy

I assume you are talking about ACP and APS. THey are strictly political blogs and this one is not.

Our content is not predicated or driven by comments. Sure they are nice and appreciated, but not mandatory by any means.

THe traffic has grown pretty steadily at 25% (avg) per month since we launched in April, so that in and of itself is a pretty good indication that it is a useful site to a significant number of people.

There are two trains of thought on the anonymous/registered comments.I happen to be of the opinion (based on a lot of experience managing blogs that are 1000 times larger than this one) that registration is a turn off to traffic. Sure you monitor the comments and moderate them as needed. We have a program in place here and comments do not appear until our system deems you “trustworthy”. The whole, call me with your name, address, phone number and social security number to comment is ridiculous.

BUt seriously, thanks for reading and for leaving a comment!
Paul A. Richards

I understand.

But, to bypass the ID issue for a moment . . . can the postings be tagged within “Local Politics” so that comments and posts can become threads?

Back to ID: What does a moderator do if the comments get out of control? See APS for examples.

Paul
http://www.eyeonannapolis.net Eye Spy

I am not sure I understand your question on tagging. You can use a category search (right side bar) and there is a LOCAL POLITICS category. Withing any post there are also tags which further refine it. Ex. LOCAL POLITICS might be a category and JOSH COHEN might be a tag. They are mutually exclusive. You can also use the search box at the top and it will handle tags, categories, phrases, keywords, etc. We try to do a pretty thorough SEO run on all posts except for blog notes. But I am not sure what you mean can they be threads? I have seen nested comments where there are a lot of comments and you can reply to a particular comment (as opposed to just having the comment be listed as the next) but we are not to the level of comments to need that yet.

Each site sets it’s own policies for moderation. Paul Foer requires you to post a comment and then email him with your personal information. Once he receives it and verifies you (via phone or phone book I suppose) he allows it. I feel this is extreme, but it is his policy on ACP.

APS for a while let any and all be said. I believe there was a method to that madness and it served a purpose I suppose. But they did get out of control (IMHO) and shoudl have been moderated.

Here, if you do not register with this site, your comment will be held for approval. Once you are registered, you need to make a certain number of approved comments without having any disapproved before your comments will show up. But disapprovals will revert you back to moderated status and enough will ban you from commenting at all. It’s not perfect but for now it works well. Yes, someone could make 30 beautiful comments and then slam us with spam and it would go through. But we do have several people that monitor the site each day to keep an eye on things. Our concern has been mostly from spamming and bad code more than comment content.

There were many racist comments which were deleted or edited surrounding the Christopher Jones murder.

THe basic rules of civility apply. If you use the 7 words you can;t say on television, they will be moderated. Slurs (of any type)are also moderated. On occasion, the point of a comment is legitimate and then we will edit it. We trust that our readers are smart enough to put 2 and 2 together to get the gist, but we do not need to facilitate the affront.

Hope that explains it. BUt on your comment/thread question, if you can explain it a bit better, shoot us an email at info@eyeonannapolis.net or use the contact us form.

And, I offer an apology for a snarky reply to one of your comments. I forgot which is was, but let’s just say that I believe there was a case of mistaken identity!