Sentinel.com blog

The Sentinel website, staff blogs and mobile apps received more than 4.8 million page views for the month of January. Below we’ve included a list of most-viewed stories. The list is topped, unfortunately, by an account of a man who adopted an unusual fighting technique. The story was picked up on the front page of fark.com and received more than 20,000 page views.

Those kind of stories, even when they get some viral attention, don’t drive the most traffic on the site. The Sentinel home page received more than 870,000 views. Photo galleries, led by shots from the Mavericks Invitation, this year and years past, generated more than 110,000 views. The Sentinel calendar (look for February updates to the most-used online calendar in the county) accounted from more than 85,000 views.

Of the total of close to 5 million views, about 20 percent (just shy of 1 million) came from mobile apps for iPhone, Android and iPad that didn’t exist in January 2011, and more than 370,000 came from m.santacruzsentinel.com – viewed on mobile web browsers.

Upcoming projects include the launch of updated tourism pages, a new commenting system (hint: Disqus), calendar updates (hint: Eventful), site redesign, continued work with the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab, more extensive use of photos.santacruzsentinel.com for local photo presentations, updates to Sentinel staff blogging platforms, an updated content management system, development of local apps from our newsroom, and we’ve been experimenting with interesting possibilities from rebelmouse.com.

With all kinds of hard work from Kirby Scudder and Wallace Baine, we’ve also launched The Muse blog – for all things related to the Creative Life in Santa Cruz County. Sign up for e-mail updates for all new posts (bottom right of the blog) to be connected with the best art & entertainment coverage.

Thanks to all who visited the Sentinel online, on your phones, tablets, and to our print and e-edition subscribers. We’re taking your news tips and suggestions 24/7.

Most viewed stories for January:

1. Man drops drawers during fight challenge on West Cliff Drive, police said
2. Galactic surprise: New find overturns theories how our galaxy evolved
3. Teen with dad, dog drives off Santa Cruz wharf
4. Driver strikes cyclist on Branciforte Drive, then crashes into concrete divider
5. Killer whales on the hunt in the Monterey Bay
6. Newsmaker 2012: Fatal party bus incident under review by Santa Clara County prosecutors
7. Dave’s Gourmet Albacore ends 13-year run in Santa Cruz
8. Scotts Valley-area man missing since Friday
9. Images released of fake doctor in Santa Cruz hospital heist
10. Felton woman injured in 2009 Mount Hermon Road crash dies
    

1) We’re asking reporters to use twitter to update the site. Sports reporters are sending in their updates here using #scscore. Newsroom reporters are sending us updates here using #scsnews. Got a score or newsworthy item? You’re welcome to use the hash tags.

2) We’ve added an outside page that includes the best of our coverage from the print edition, but also a collection of video, links to the best of our outdoors photography, links to all kinds of recreation opportunities around here, live surf reports courtesy of Surfline.com, and a little twitter widget featuring the list of surfers we follow on twitter.

3) Got Daily Deals -If you’re a follower of the Sentinel on Facebook, Twitter or elsewhere, we’re making sure you have a chance to get in on the Daily Deal from local businesses. We

4) Facebook comments: Facebook has added a few features to their commenting system, including opportunities to login through Yahoo! or Hotmail. We feel like the tools they’re offering make it a good alternative to Disqus, which despite a lot of effort, didn’t cooperate with our content management system.  We’ll revisit the commenting system when our content management system is upgrated (sometime this year is the expectation). We actually really like Disqus, if we could make it work. It’s pretty seamless with our WordPress blogs.

5) We’re shooting video of a couple amazing stunts to be performed this weekend at the Boardwalk. Look for it on Saturday night.

We’re continuing to work with Disqus.com to restore article commenting. Two issues seemed to come up with changes made on Disqus’ end at the end of last week. The minor issue is for Firefox users who were able to type five lines of comments and wouldn’t see a scroll bar, and couldn’t see what they were typing. According to Disqus, this is a global issue.

The other issue was more significant for Sentinel readers, and it had to do with the way Disqus interacts with our somewhat unique content management system for Internet Explorer users. For some IE users, at some times, Disqus comments jumped to the top of the article page and hid the article content – obviously not acceptable.

The same issue led us to shut down the comments just before Christmas. In that case, it had to do with changes made on Disqus’ end.

There are other issues that make Disqus awkward for IE users on our site, but we like their options for login and we like Disqus’ moderation tools.

We are committed to using a comment system that requires registration, but unsure if Disqus will be the answer. Many Bay Area papers in MediaNews, including the Mercury News, have been using a Facebook commenting system that we also tested. That’s a possible solution for us, as well.

We appreciate your patience while we work out the issues.

We’re on Day 2 of a new commenting system. We appreciate the participation and the respect for readers and other commenters. Here’s a look at our commenting community at a glance:

Powered by Disqus

Here’s a look at some of the stats:

Starting this evening, the Sentinel will be using a new commenting service for its online articles.

The service is provided by Disqus, and requires a login, unlike the previous system, provided by Topix. Readers will be able to log in using their Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo, or OpenID accounts, or they can sign up through disqus.com

The new system allows readers some further controls about how they view comments, which can be sorted to be viewed by most recent or most popular. Readers are also able to share their comments more easily through their own social profile. The new system will also allow our reporters to message and interact with commenters who may have information that advances the story.

Disqus features

The commenting feature on our articles has been popular since its debut in 2006, and we hope that our readers continue to discuss issues that affect Santa Cruz County on our site. In 2010, we’ve had more than 2.5 million page views on article commenting.

We like the idea that all subjects we cover could be vigorously debated, and we liked the idea that we wouldn’t put many hurdles in the way of discussion. But the old service could be as caustic as it was popular. We took efforts to moderate the forum, killing an average of 100 comments a day, banning users, disabling threads and adding help in the newsroom and from freelancers to moderate the conversation.

We think Disqus will help users take a little more responsibility fortheir comments on our site and improve the tone of the conversation. It also gives us a few more options with regard to moderation. We may expire some threads, we may require comments to be pre-approved on stories of our choice.

Disqus, also used by CNN, MTV, The Atlantic, Fox News and TechCrunch, among others, also pulls in mentions of Sentinel articles from other social media sites.

We welcome your feedback on our new service.

Here’s an image of how it looks:

(We’ll be adding Disqus comments to Sentinel blogs in the New Year. Thanks also to several brighter minds in the community, and the Disqus help team for helping us through some technical issues. – Tom)

For the past week and a half, we’ve been occasionally using Facebook for article commenting. (See this article on ice cream with marijuana in it). It’s in an effort to offer the best commenting experience possible for our readers. We’d also like to interact more directly with commenters.

We’ve had about two dozen responses to the idea of running comments through Facebook. A handful have welcomed the switch, a handful have concerns about Facebook privacy, and handful of you have called us morons (again).

The commenting system we’ve used since early in 2008 is through Topix which allows users to comment without registration (although you may register with Topix).

Our comments receive a ton of traffic, more than 1.8 million page views in 2010. Some people love the comments, some people despise them (everyone from certain mayors to certain anarchists have asked us for changes), but lots of people read them. One point of clarification – we’re not getting rich from our comment board and costs aren’t a real factor in making any changes.

We’d like to see an improved tone to our comment threads and remain a host to debate on local issues. It’s pretty much a free-for-all right now, despite our considerable moderation efforts (also the subject of some second-guessing). We kill about 100 posts a day, ban about 10 users a day, and turn off comments on several stories every week.

The fact that every article generates conversation is good. That people are accustomed to participating is outstanding. The tone may be reflective of the sentiments of the community at large, but my take is that there are about a dozen posters who are fairly extreme and prolific. Every comment system is likely to have the same percentage of those extreme voices.

Still, we’re working on changes. I think we would see a better conversation if reporters and editors jumped in and engaged the audience on a regular basis, but it seems they’re usually busy reporting, writing and editing the next story.

As we continue to gather feedback, we may test several more alternatives. Thanks for your patience, your participation and your opinions.

Not surprisingly, Topix commenters are commenting about our possible changes. Gotta love the Internet!