Your personal A2K experience. Tell us about it.

Quote:

As a relatively 'newbie', I joined a2k during 2005

Dutchy, I could have sworn that you have been here longer! I can't recall a time when you weren't around.

All the same, that's six years. Definitely not to be sneezed at!

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My forte is is the trivia and word games section

For those of you who don't indulge in the "words" section, Dutchy is the undisputed king of word games. And he is incredibly fast at it! The speed of lightning!

Thanks for your kind words, Dutchy. Very nice of you.

You can be proud of your posts dlowan they have substance, mine are mostly one word wonders

Yes, but you have been venturing out of your comfort zone lately....what is up with that?

How long before that was Abuzz?

Member since September 8, 2005
I didn't realise that.

A quality, moderated community site

New York Times Digital Launches Campaign for Abuzz
Pamela Parker | July 24, 2000



In its first effort to market Abuzz, the community and knowledge-sharing property it bought back in July 1999, New York Times Digital, the newspaper company's digital arm, on Monday kicked off an advertising campaign.
The ads, created by Ogilvy & Mather, will have online, outdoor, and print incarnations, and will focus on the knowledge-sharing aspects of the site.
Abuzz, which is currently found on NYTimes.com, Boston.com, NYToday.com, GolfDigest.com and WineToday.com, allows users to participate in discussions, ask questions, and answer questions, about topics that interest them.
"Abuzz represents the next step in the evolution of the New York Times Digital network, serving as the 'intelligent ingredient' that brings together the New York Times audience with that of other high-quality content and information-rich sites," said Martin Nisenholtz, chief executive officer of New York Times Digital.
"We will continue this campaign into the fall, as we extend Abuzz across a network of partner sites that complement our strategy and audience."
The company is leveraging the print properties of its parent company for the campaign. Full-page, four-color teaser ads will appear in the New York Times and the Boston Globe. The ads show a variety of people from across the country raising their hands, with copy like "Max knows" and "Anne knows," highlighting the site as a network of knowledgeable people.
On August 2, a four-page, four-color insert, will break in the New York Times and the Boston Globe, followed by placement in The New York Times Magazine. Simultaneously, outdoor advertising will appear in both the New York and Boston markets.
"We are fortunate to be able to leverage the power of the New York Times and the Boston Globe to introduce this campaign," said Nisenholtz.
"In addition, using our own owned-and-operated sites as the foundation for this network is another great example of how a click and brick company can effectively utilize established brands to bring a new brand to life."
The online portion of the campaign will feature interactive banners showing specific questions that link to a Web page, allowing people to experience the different aspects of Abuzz. The ads will appear on a variety of health, business, travel, entertainment and city sites from August through September.

"The acquisition of Abuzz is a timely and strategic fit as we build our Internet business to scale and is a major building block in our digital future," Martin Nisenholtz, CEO of Times Company Digital, said in a statement.
As reported earlier, Beehive software enables organizations to collect and distribute knowledge not captured in written form across a company or the Internet using email as its core means of transmission.
Beehive manages expertise by building profiles or other virtual communities, routing requests for knowledge directly to these experts and automatically archiving the exchanges for reuse.
Using its email-based architecture, Beehive can support large, distributed organizations, serving as an intranet application that enables employees to share expertise. The program also can act as an extranet product that helps firms to share knowledge with customers or partners and as an Internet application that lets current and potential customers share knowledge with one another, the company said.


Read more: http://news.cnet.com/New-York-Times-acquires-Abuzz/2100-1023_3-228494.html#ixzz1IjazpPBU

Posted by Alexandra Jaffe on May 3, 2010 at 4:27 PM
Speaking at the Wharton School of Business' "Future of Publishing" conference on Friday afternoon, Martin Nisenholtz, the senior vice president of digital operations at the New York Times, offered remarks on the future of engagement in the wake of Facebook's new web-sharing tools.

Nisenholtz emphasized engagement as an aspect of a publication's online offering for which readers might be willing to pay for access to that online content.

"The more engaged our users are with us, the more value we deliver to them, the more likely they will be to pay," he said.

He offers a number of ways to engage readers, noting that posts with slide shows and video result in longer visits to the site and more pageviews, and that those readers who offer reviews for the site use it more frequently than those who do not. Nisenholtz also said that 60 percent of visitors to the NYT website go directly to the homepage, and that they are trying to recreate this success with a revamped Business homepage.

But the changes to Facebook offer newspapers the ability to take better advantage of what Nisenholtz calls "one of our most leverageable assets": the audience.

"Here, I'm referring to our audience as knowledgeable participants in the life our web site," he said. "This creates the essential emotional bond that will lead to real engagement in an interactive setting."

The readers of the New York Times can offer each other their knowledge, he goes on to explain, through an interactive question-and-answer system, which currently exists in the form of Abuzz. This rarely-mentioned software offers users the ability to ask questions of other users, somewhat like Yahoo!Answers, and perhaps Nisenholtz's remarks on the software mean it will soon play a higher-profile part in the social networking aspects of the NYT's site.

How will Facebook's changes help software like Abuzz work better? They will create "aggregated identity," the phrase coined by media analysts to describe an identity that is consistent across the web.

"At the heart of this kind of knowledge sharing is identity.," he says of Abuzz. "I don't just mean real names, although that helps. I mean a track record based on a lot of input."

In addition to sharing knowledge, the New York Times must "transition from being on the web to being of the web," Nisenholtz says.

This involves a greater emphasis on fluidity of information, and Nisenholtz looks forward to a time where the "boundaries of (NYTimes.com) become liquid, fluid, shared"--a place for people to gain and impart knowledge, where readers become contributors.

He mentions the importance of "game-like" projects like Twitter and states that the NYT must integrate these new "fun, whimsical interfaces" into its website to create a deeper emotional connection with its readers. This emotional connection, he claims, is an important aspect of the future of the newspaper.

"We have an opportunity to redefine the essential relationship that we have with our users--and change the contract we have with them--from one that is loose, free and casual, to one of real emotional commitment," he said.