ABC News Radio

This is a Development Site.  We could call it a jargony term like 'super-hyper-beta-alpha-release-candidate-0.81' or something equally silly.  But really what this means is that this site is a work in progress.

You're likely to see a ton of design overhauls, feature and functionality additions and improvements, and maybe a few bugs.  Most bugs are squashed fairly quickly but feel free to ping us if you have suggestions on how to improve things.

The ABC News Radio web platform is more than just a website and will go through several iterations.  We'd like to officially launch the site by the end of 2009.   At launch we should have a few content blogs, great audio podcasts from around the ABC News world, and tons of original video. 

Additionally, over the next year or so we're working to roll out a content-focused API, several data archival tools, and further integration with the social web.  The goal is to a.) provide a sophisticated service to our radio and content affiliates, and b.) provide an equally great service to the public at large.  We want our content to be easily consumed, discussed, and shared both offline and on.

Thanks much for swinging by our home-in-the-making.  We really do appreciate it.  To stay current on site updates you can grab our feed, follow us on Twitter, or add our Facebook page (below). If you have any questions, comments or critiques feel free to drop us a line.

Blog Feed

Twitter

Facebook

Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

Digital Audio Manager

and

Website Platform Director

@danpatterson

ABC News Radio Video Page

For the past few weeks we've been playing around with video.  We still haven't settled on a CDN ('Content Delivery Network' for those less jargon-prone) and are still testing a few different options. 

For the time being, we're using the great Blip.tv dashboard to upload videos, track metrics, and redistribute to YouTube, Vimeo, and the Internet Archive.

Over the next few weeks we're going to toy around with video interviews recorded in our studios at ABC News Radio, live from breaking news events, and mobile reporting.

We're pretty proud of our video quality - both in terms of the journalism and interview subjects and technical recording quality.  And of course we want to distribute our videos - both to our affiliates and our listeners - in the most user-friend formats.

Priorities include:

• Getting breaking news and important clips to our affiliates.
• Providing a great podcast experience through RSS, iTunes, Zune, and other sites.
• Creating a great mobile video viewing experience.
• Providing videos in multiple topic-specific channels like news, politics, entertainment, and sports.
• Integrating with the social web on sites like Facebook, Twitter, UStream and more.

As always, your comments and suggestions are encouraged!  We know that you watch a ton of video, so drop us a line with your ideas on how best to implement various types of live, real-time, and podcast video.  Stay current by grabbing the RSS Feed and by following us on Facebook and Twitter (below).

Thanks.

Blog Feed

Twitter

Facebook

- Dan Patterson

Digital Audio Manager

and

Website Platform Director

@danpatterson

Hi there!  It's been a while since we've checked in.  This is not to imply that nothing has been popping at ABC News Radio.  The opposite, in fact!  We've been pretty busy here at ABC News Radio.

I'll post a list of our current projects a bit later this week, but right now I'm stoked to have implemented Google Friend Connect (Wikipedia link) on our sites. See that little 'Sign In' button in the right side bar?  Click it and you can securely log in with your Google credentials.  

What does this mean for you?  A few things:  First, it means that you can easily interact with this site.  It also gives you a bit more security as Google handles the authentication process, not us - Google acts as a thrid-party buffer between websites and end-users.

Much like the Disqus/Facebook/OAuth/OpenID implimentation of a few weeks ago, Google Friend Connect allows you to log in to our and follow our site and content in Google.  This will allow you to use your Gmail credentials to log in, follow us in your Google Reader, and share our content with your Google Contacts.

More site updates coming soon.

As always, the RSS feed for this blog is here, you can follow us @ABCNewsRadio on Twitter, and catch our and status updates on Facebook.

If you have any questions, comments or critiques, please visit our Contact Page.

Thanks!

- Dan Patterson

Digial Audio Manager

ABC News Radio

This week ABC News Radio took a giant step closer to launching our new site.  As you know, this site is a development site - we're working hard to integrate our broadcast properties with the social web.

Krystyn Heide, a Squarespace developer, has done fantastic work both cleaning up our code (especially the CSS - those pretty round corners) and significantly improving the design of our site.

A priority of ours is to make the site as simple and 'flat' as possible, and to emphasize beautiful design.  We're very proud of our news content, and want the site to fade in to the background as much as possible, allowing you easy and quick accesss to what matters most: great news content.

Additionally, you'll soon be able to play audio content (podcasts) directly within posts.  We're also working on ways to push / pull content and comments from the social web.  Our goal is to wrap conversation around content in near real-time.

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or critiques please feel free to drop us a line, or ping us on the social web.  Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

Blog RSS Feed

Twitter

Facebook

The ABC News Radio development site blog URL and feed have changed.  This is a minor change and won't affect most of you (the Feedburner feed remains the same).  However, be aware the the blog URL and feed has been shortened from /site-updates to simply /blog.  The true URL is now simple http://abcnewsradioonline.com/blog and the true RSS feed is http://abcnewsradioonline.com/blog/rss.xml.  Again, most readers are subscribed to the constant (and unchanging) Feedburner feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/AbcNewsRadioOnlineUpdates.  If you're subscribed to this feed, you will experience no changes.

Here are the important links:

Site Update Blog URL

Site Update Blog Feed

Also of note:  we have enabled the instant update protocol PubSubHubBub to facilitate instant pings of feed readers and other notification services.

ABC News Radio on Twitter

ABC News Radio on Facebook

Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

Identity, online and off, is very important.  Identity is tied to trust, ideas, and individuality.  We take great pride in providing world-class reporting.  And our great reporting is tied to the great individuals who comprise ABC News Radio.  

The massive, buzzy social web is also highly integrated with individual identity and we're making great strides to define our identity online.  As we continue to integrate our terrestrial radio product with the social web, we're contestant looking for ways to increase engagement around our content.  Comments and discussion on Facebook and Twitter are, obviously, very important to true engagement.

The team at Disqus has helped ABC News Radio use their commenting platform   In addition to logging in using your OpenID, Disqus, Facebook, and Twitter profiles, you now have the ability to retweet / repost our content to your media feed.  

Thanks again for your comments and critiques of ABC News Radio.  As we progress towards official launch, your help and feedback becomes more and more important.  You can always contact us on Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed.  And our email is located here.

So give it a shot - log in using your preferred ID and let us know what you think!

Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

Last week ABC News Radio Online started using our Facebook and Twitter accounts publicly.  Before the weekend begins, I thought it would be fun to make 'Facebook' and 'Twitter' subpages to ABC News Radio Online.

Facebook offers a number of ways to integrate community with sites - we've integrated our Facebook Page with our this page.

Twitter has released a neat live search widget that culls mentions from across their platform.  We've added the widget to our Twitter page.

Though these are not terribly robust applications, they are fun ways to integrate the two communitites on ABC News Radio online.

Try our Facebook and Twitter pages over the weekend.  As always, your comments, critiques, and feedback are welcome.

Thanks.

- Dan Patterson

Site RSS Feed

ABC News Radio on Twitter

ABC News Radio Site Development Blog

There have a been a few updates to the ABC News Radio Online platform. 

The ABC News Radio Facebook Page is growing quickly - thanks to everyone who joined!  We've added the Facebook 'Fanbox' to ABC News Radio.  The Fanbox will live on our Online page and is live right now.  You can also see the Fanbox on the front page of this site.  The Fanbox aggregates our news content, allows you to signup, and provides a few nifty interactive features.

Comments are live and social!  We're testing the Disqus commenting system to our posts cross-site.  There may be some integration bugs, but right now Disqus seems to be working just fine.  Disqus is a comment aggregator that provides an identity system for all commentors, and allows easy site registration.

So, leave a comment below with your thoughts on our comment and Facebook integration - we'd love to know what you think!

Site RSS Feed

ABC News Radio on Twitter

ABC News Radio Site Development Blog

Three pre-weekend updates from ABC News Radio Online:

We've added an audio player and 'Listen' page that contains our latest news and audio.  This particular player pulls from our podcast full content RSS feed.  We'll be upgrading the player and adding several useful features soon

We've added a 'Headlines' section.  This section pulls the latest headlines and breaking news from ABC News, then points back to the original story.  Over the next few months we'll add ABC News Radio headlines to the mix.

Finally, we've integrated an 'Advanced Search' feature in order to help you find specific pieces of audio and news content.  As we continue to integrate our content library, Search will play an increasingly important role on our site.

As always, if you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact us.

Thanks.

ABC News Radio Online

ABC News Radio on Twitter

ABC News Radio Site Development Blog

There have a few small updates to the ABC News Radio Online site. 

I've updated the home page feed with our most recent podcasts - the RSS feed is here.  This page uses a Yahoo Pipe to aggregate our most recent posts.  This page will eventually include all media content - video, audio, picutres, and text - from ABC News Radio.

The Online page has been updated with links to our Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, and Digg pages.  This page is still a bit clunkey as it's just widgets, but it's a nice entry point to our content distribution outlets.  This page will eventually include our entire online presence.

We have an experimental Correspondents page with links to updates from our Tech Editor Andrea Smith, our Entertainment Editor Andrea Dresdale, and Entertainment Correspondent David Blaustein.  This page will eventually grow to include all of our correspondents and anchors.

As always, if you have any questions or comments please feel free to contact us.

Thanks.

ABC News Radio Online

ABC News Radio on Twitter

ABC News Radio Site Development Blog