CoPress

We’re a day late on this because of everyone’s travel, but the show must go on!

Around the Network

The discussion of advertising rates continued this week. Brad Arendt approaches the issue of click-throughs and identifies two issues: finding the proper tool to accurately count click-throughs and take down the ad when the limit had been reached, as well as educating your local business owner on the concept so that it doesn’t discount the “value in brand awareness.” In fact, Bryan Murley argues that costs per clicks are a “horrible idea for college media sites, akin to allowing advertisers to only pay for print ads per the number of coupons that are brought in from an ad.” He’s more interested in looking into selling against user engagement with the site, based on such metrics as the amount of time spent on the site.

Also, Mo Jangda reported in the forum that he’s published a better version of the Co-Authors WordPress Plugin.

On the wiki, there’s now excellent information and background on the Tulane Hullabaloo website, Miles started a new page on editing WordPress themes, and Daniel started a page on tools for measuring engagement

In the News

Last but not least, here are the top four links from the past week that you should check out this weekend (via the CoPress Publish2 Newsgroup):

• A reputation economy is a good model for comments – Mark Briggs thinks you should tie a reputation system to commenting. If you take it one step further and assign semantic data to the comments, you could come up with a very interesting database of information.
• Rebooting the News podcast for April 19 – Excellent discussion between Dave Winer and Jay Rosen on the future of news. Of particular interest is Dave’s observation that the newspaper industry is going through the first revolution that the tech industry has already gone through more than a dozen times. Jay also introduces an idea for open news assignments that I think has legs.
• Measuring user engagement: Lessons from BusinessWeek – Great post by Eric Ulken on how BusinessWeek measures user engagement on their website. It’s time to understand traffic better than uniques and pageviews.
• Sesh Ideas for BCNI Philly – A couple of ideas for what to discuss at BarCamp NewsInnovation Philly.