Bakotopia.com relaunches with new look, new platform

Five-year-old Bakotopia.com has just relaunched with a long-overdue redesign that emphasizes the site's strengths in blogging and social interaction around local entertainment and whacks dead wood that built up over the years.

Some of the highlights:

• A greater emphasis on what you want to read. We pruned some of the stuff that just wasn't getting traffic and put more focus on the things people were using.
• A livelier logo.
• Dozens of different wallpapers that change regularly with each new page. Our long-term goal is to let our readers and artists in the community design future wallpapers. 
• A widget that pulls in entertainment stories from bakersfield.com.The new design pulls in a PDF of The Californian's Thursday Eye on Entertainment section We know Bakotopia is something of an alternative to The Californian, but we also know The Californian delivers local entertainment news Bakotopia readers are interested in.
• More promotion for the weekly Bakotopia Radio show on KRAB 106.1 FM, which features local music and exclusive live performances.

We're publishing the site with the open-source Drupal publishing system.

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The 99-cent question

It's been about 6 weeks since the launch of the 661411 iPhone app, a downloadable version of 661411.com, Kern County's most popular mobile website.

The app is produced by Verve Wireless, the same company that created the award-winning Associated Press mobile app. Verve also provides the news, entertainment, weather and sports alerts we send out through the 21321 text-message short code.

Since launch, more than 600 mobile-phone users have paid 99 cents to download the app from the iTunes store. I'm pretty happy with those numbers, and can't wait for the pending launch of our 661411 Blackberry app, to be followed by apps for Android and WindowsLive, among others.

Unlike most other media outlets with mobile apps (CNN being the most prominent exception), we opted to charge for our app, even if it was a nominal 99 cents.

So, I was surprised to read a one-star review in the iTunes store for the 661411 app that read, in part: The 661411 app features some content available only to our mobile customers

"I can't believe I just paid a buck for an application that has advertisements in it. I want my dollar back. Shame on TBC [The Bakersfield Californian] for being completely out of touch."

Completely out of touch? Really?

Here's who's completely out of touch: Clueless people who think that a dollar should buy them their own personal nirvana.

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FeedBrewer taking Printcasting into the future

Updated on Friday, October 15, 2010 at 8:23 PM by Logan Molen

It’s exciting to finally be able to talk publicly about the launch of FeedBrewer Inc., a new company created to provide custom publishing services utilizing the Printcasting tools that have their roots in Bakersfield.

FeedBrewer is the next evolution of Printcasting, a self-publishing venture funded by the Knight Foundation and Participata LLC, a subsidiary of The Bakersfield Californian. Participata, which provides staff and other funding for the two-year Printcasting project, is a minority shareholder in FeedBrewer.

The goal with FeedBrewer is to continue Printcasting’s mission of simplifying the concept of “publish once, distribute multiple places” by providing custom services. By spinning off a new company, we think we’ll be better positioned to find the outside investment that can ensure the project’s long-term success. Printcasting will remain a free service at its core, but we envision FeedBrewer as a business that provides a variety of "freemium" services.

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