Here are some Edmonton-related things I found interesting this week:
- I posted about a couple things already: the new hockey arena concept, and the Halloween Festival.
- Today, Canwest Global relaunched about ten websites, one of which was the Edmonton Journal site. Sadly, there’s nothing unique about the new look. Every Canwest newspaper site in the country looks the same. Opportunity missed, I think.
- The latest Edmonton Radio Ratings were released recently. The Fall 2008 book is probably the most important of the year – 630 CHED and CISN Country top the list.
- The Edmonton Sun now has RSS feeds! I wrote more about social media and local news earlier this week.
- The City of Edmonton is considering a hiring freeze for next year, and warns there could be layoffs. Maybe we’re not entirely insulated from the economic situation after all!
- Homeward Trust finally released the final numbers for the 2008 Homeless Count. A total of 3079 people without a permanent place to live were counted, an 18% increase from 2006.
- I updated the Organizations page on the EdmontonTweetup wiki with some of the most recent to join Twitter, including Sonic 102.9 FM, MacEwan College, and Transcend Coffee. Welcome!
- Tomorrow is the last day for the Festival of Trees! Admission is $6 for adults, and the event takes place at the Shaw Conference Centre.
MasterMaq's Blog 
Hey Mack, I was scanning your blog and didn’t find your coverage of the new City of Edmonton website. They redid it a while ago: http://edmonton.ca/
Of course every Canwest site looks the same, in these days of falling newspaper revenues, it’s unlikely that each paper has it’s own web team.
Perhaps it can serve as a reminder that every Canwest paper, representing nearly every major daily paper in Canada, *is* just one media conglomerate.
I’m with Greg… not sure how having the Edmonton Journal website look like the Calgary Herald is a lost opportunity.
They probably spent a lot of resources on developing the best design, so why deviate from a good design just so each newspapers site can be dramatically different? It’s not like too many people are going to notice, let alone care, that they’re the same.
Eric, I mentioned it back in September:
https://blog.mastermaq.ca/2008/09/27/edmonton-notes-for-9-27-2008/
Greg & Rob: I realize there are benefits that come from having a single web team, but I still feel they missed an opportunity. Unless you think Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver, and other Canadian cities are all the same! I don’t think the websites should be drastically different, but they could be a little unique for each city.
Hi all. We did in fact redesign the “core” of the sites with one web team, but there was a large amount of work and customization done at every local market to ensure the needs and personality of each community are reflected. Bear in mind that we completely reinvented and relaunched 10 of the biggest news and information sites in this country in a very short period of time. We wanted to be sure we could deliver a solid product to our communities as quickly as possible, which did necessitate some degree of uniformity. Rest assured that this is only the first step and that you can expect to see a significant amount of local customization going forward. These sites will continue to grow and change to suit the needs of their local markets.
Hey Steve, any plans to use Facebook Connect or OpenID?
Working on it. We have a big focus on having waaaaay more community functionality going forward. To start, we have the pretty basic “share on facebook” type tools on the story pages. That just gets us in the game though – we are going to be doing a lot more to provide people with some pretty cool tools. Going to take a bit of time though.
Hrm.. sounds good. I hope it’s not proprietary stuff though. Like for example I personally wouldn’t find social networking tools on a news site very useful. Instead the ability to interact with my social networking site of choice would be ideal. But hey, that’s just me 😀
Agreed. We have no interest in building our own Facebook. Why would we when it already exists? Makes way more sense for us to let them do what they do well, and for us to do what we do well.
Any plans to fix the RSS feeds Steve? Old ones broke, and the new ones are nowhere to be found. I contacted the Edmonton Journal website department and they said they would have someone look at it, but haven’t heard since.
We have a team working on this right now. The old ones should be working by now, and yes, we will have RSS feeds for all the new sections hooked up next week. Every section of the sitemap will be RSS enabled.
That’s awesome, thanks! I noticed yesterday that the old feeds started working again, so I’m happy for now 🙂
Glad to hear it. Just wait though – you haven’t seen anything yet! This redesign just gets us in the game. Many, many enhancements in the pipeline.