Stephanie Romanski

On my way to Norfolk, Nebraska where I was going to be talking to folks in the Nebraska Tourism industry about Social Media, I had to pass through Clarks, Nebraska. I’m trying to find a way to write this post without coming across as a cheesy loser, but here goes.

As many might know, the founder of Twitter, Evan Williams, is from Clarks, Nebraska – population: 361 give or take.

I’ve been a sort of casual “fan” of Evan’s since I began using Blogger when it was still a part of Pyra Labs and I learned the founder was from Nebby. I say “fan” with quotes because I didn’t, you know, follow his every business move, but I loved Blogger and I love Twitter and I think it’s neat that Evan’s involved in both and I think it’s even neater that he’s from Nebraska (in fact, it’s one of the ‘hooks’ I use to try and interest my newsroom into using Twitter).

As I passed through Clarks, it really struck me that someone could come from this tiny tiny place and be innovative and successful. Oh sure, there are many well-known people who have come from small towns to make it big and I applaud them all, but Clarks is close to home. It sounds cheesy as hell, I know, but I had a little moment of inspiration driving through this small farm town.

After close to nine months of doing am:gi, a daily morning “conversation” with our readers, we ended the show a little over a week ago. Why? Because it’s time to take what we’ve learned from it and evolve the concept a little.

There was some pressure from above to do something with the show. Either change it up or kill it. We decided to do both. We could not seem to grow our viewer numbers. We needed big numbers to show advertisers to sell it and with the format of am:gi, (90 minutes every weekday, occasional guests, too much free-form conversation) we simply couldn’t get enough participants or replays to entice advertisers. The time involved for the two of us who ran the show every morning was another factor.

So we killed it. We killed it a lot.

But there were some awesome things that came out of having a daily conversation and we are now going to take those awesome things and spin them into four separate things that will be so awesome it might just make you explode with, well,  awesomeness.

First thing’s first: We love Cover it Live. We love it so much, we’re using it in all four new ventures. So big giant HURRAY for Cover it Live.

• Breaking comments. One of the ventures we are implementing right now. As some of you know, we’ve back and forth-ed on commenting for a long time. We simply can’t moderate every single comment as decried by our corporate owners because we simply don’t have the manpower. Also, the commenting system that comes with our software is… antiquated. But we really do want to have some form of commenting available. Our solution? We will embed a Cover it Live ‘chat’ on hot topic stories. The ‘talkers’, if you will. We’ll have one for Breaking stories, of course, but we’ll open up the conversation for severe weather, for example, as well. It will be moderated so we’ll remain in compliance with corporate policies, but we’ll at least be offering some way for our readers to engage and talk about a story.

• Live Coverage. Another “spinoff” of am:gi will be live coverage. Our highest replays ever came from the day George and I went to Husker Harvest Days. George manned am:gi,  I went roving around, sending pics from HHD to Twitter which fed into the show. We learned that the people, they like this! Hopefully with the help of the Verizon MiFi (ohpleaseohpleaseohplease) and Cover it Live, we will continue to be a presence at events such as Black Friday, Expos, and the biggie: the State Fair’s first year in GI next year. The MiFi will let us not have to worry about whether the event has wi-fi and allow us to be pretty flexible. Plus it’s just cool.

• Newsmaker Interviews. “Newsmakers” will be a spinoff of our guest segments from am:gi. We will do simple interviews and Q&A’s with people in our community who are in the news. We’re shooting for two per week. We will solicit questions from the community ahead of time (using email, a submission page, a Google Voice number to leave question) and during the show. The real value for this is in the replays and in the reverse-publishing.

• Ask the Independent. Ask us anything. We’ll find the answer for you. Need to know how to contact a City Council member? We’ll get you numbers. Want to know where the money to move the State Fair came from? We’ll get that info for you. We may not be able to help you find your socks, but we can tell you which color looks best with khaki trousers This show will be once a week and we’ll take questions via email, our Google Voice line, and a submission page on our website – oh and live during the show, time-permitting.

So those are our four spinoffs. The timesuck and manpower is lessened, but we feel the potential for advertisers is a lot bigger than it ever could have been with am:gi.

Don’t get me wrong, we loved am:gi and we met great people and discovered a little about what our community was talking about. But now it’s time to take those lessons and try the next thing. I’m very excited about these ideas.

Adobe AIR is conflicting with my newspaper’s security controls. Currently, I use (and prefer) Twhirl for my desktop client because I really like being able to put the multiple accounts I manage onto my second monitor so I can watch the Twitter streams at a glance when I see new tweets appear. I just work better with Twitter like this:

I like that each Twhirl window is a different account and I don’t have to manually click a button to change between accounts like I do with, ohhhh every other freaking Twitter client out there. It’s why I don’t like Tweetdeck for managing multiple accounts.I want my multiple accounts viewable at-a-glance.

The problem with any AIR app is this:

Every single time each Twhirl window open makes a call to the Twitter API, I get several of these. I have to click them away before I can tweet or read new tweets. I have tried installing the certificate it asks for but it does no good. My IT person here can’t seem to find the solution either.

So, I need another app because using web-based apps like Hootsuite, Brizzly or Seesmic Web aren’t cutting it for me. Here are my limitations:

• Can’t use an AIR app.
• I’m on Windows XP still. (The closest app that looks like it’s what I want is one @ernmander suggested called Blu, but it’s Vista only )
• Obviously security is tight here at the paper, so I cannot (and will not) download an executable installation.
• No IM allowed, so something like Digsby is a no-go. Plus I don’t know what Digsby’s multiple account support is like.

I’m just irritated that developers seem to think we all prefer everything kept in one app like Tweetdeck. I mean, I know a lot of people do and I’m probably in the minority here, but I feel a bit lost now that I’m unable to quickly dip into and out of my work and professional accounts quickly. Clicking over to them and waiting for each account to load in one app seems slow to me and harder to monitor.

So am I just not finding the right app? Or is there just not one out there that suits me which means I’ll have to *shudder* adapt to change Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!