May 06, 2008
Behind the Winning Entries: Vita.mn
Weekly, now through the end of summer, I’ll be posting one of the winning Digital Edge Award entries from the 2008 awards. All the entries are available in the report “Behind the Winning Entries,” but posting them here over time may make them more digestible and spark ideas in your newsroom as different issues come up in your communities.
Best Local Guide or Entertainment Site (circulation group 250,000 or more): Vita.mn
Entry submitted by:
Matt Thompson
Minneapolis Star Tribune
(612) 673-4000
Vita.mn, the Star Tribune’s database- and user-powered arts and entertainment site, is now about a year old. In that time, we’ve implemented a new design, new functionality, blogs, articles, and an innovative user-reward scheme called “karma.”Users have responded by writing more than 10,000 top-ten lists for more than 800 topics, tagging more than 27,000 items, submitting more than 1,100 venue reviews and delivering more than 1.9 million pageviews.
One of our biggest experiments and biggest successes with vita. mn over the past year has been “karma”, the system we created for determining the site’s most valuable users. Users receive karma points for creating and contributing content, and receive exponentially more karma when their contributions inspire other users to participate. Every month, we award prizes to the users who’ve earned the most karma during the month. This has proven to be a popular, enjoyable, effective and transparent way of giving back to the users who contribute the most. The community of users that has coalesced around the site treats karma like a spectator sport, coming back each month to view the fun. (Read a conversation about October’s karma contest here.)
Lists showed early promise as being one of the flagship features of vita.mn. That promise was fulfilled this year with a special franchise issue of the associated weekly print product – “The List of Lists.” The issue was a reverse-publishing triumph, featuring a 19-page spread created by aggregating more than 3,000 lists written by site users.This user-centric take on the typical arts-and-entertainment weekly’s “Best of ” issue brought in plenty of positive buzz from blogs, local businesses and advertisers, and especially from users.
We’re now pioneering an approach to blogging that complements vita.mn’s interactive, democratic style. Our “Alexis on the Sexes” blog aggregates the site contributions of our sex and dating columnist – top-ten lists, venue reviews, event comments, forum posts and more. This means every post, as well as being interesting content in itself is an invitation to users to engage with these features of the site. Disagree with Alexis’ review? Post your own.
The past year has seen the addition of user-submitted photos for venues and events, which appear on the home page and most section fronts, as well as on the appropriate listings pages.
We’ve added interactive maps to venue and event pages. We recently partnered with a company,
InRadio, to deliver a Flash widget, updated weekly, featuring music from artists performing in the Twin Cities during the upcoming week(you’ll find this widget on the home page).
In October, we launched a redesign that drew nothing but positive reaction from users and bloggers. As part of this redesign, we made the site’s section fronts more dynamic, using the power of tagging to pull in relevant lists, guides and discussions from all over the site.
Subscription Options
You are not logged in, so your subscription status for this entry is unknown. You can
login here.
No comments found.
|
|