Breaking Promos puts small business in spotlight

As part of our increased focus on affordable and innovative advertising vehicles, The Bakersfield Californian has launched Breaking Promos, a Twitterlike tool that connects our audiences directly to small-business advertisers. 

Breaking Promos launched Monday on Bakersfield.com, and we're working to roll the feature out to rest rest of our sites on The Bakersfield.com Network. 

The think Breaking Promos ticker scrolls deals across the bottom of local websites. The concept is simple: Local businesses can log into our self-serve system using their Twitter handle, buy digital tokens that can be redeemed as 140-character promotional posts, or so-called Breaking Promos. Those Breaking Promos go live in the Twitterstream but more importantly appear in a ticker that scrolls at the bottom of our websites.

Click to read more ...

Storify makes it easy to quickly document local news

The Californian's Louis Amestoy has been experimenting with a cool software tool called Storify to quickly and easily produce local stories in an engaging way. 

You can find a few in our Bakosphere blog, but his latest example is this "Social media look at Bakersfield weather" slideshow documenting the storm that hit Bakersfield overnight. Storify's drag-and-drop tools make it easy to monitor social media and deliver a mix of content from pros and everyday people to document news around our town. 

Keeping history alive by making it fun

The power of History Pin is captured with this 1856 photo of the Champs Elysee in Paris laid over a present-day photo. I've stumbled across three different labors of love online recently that all shared a common link: they're committed to protecting things in great danger of disappearing forever. To top it off, these efforts are fun and rewarding history lessons, almost like history as entertainment (or is it the other way around?).

Having dug into my own little history project, I'm familiar with the thrill these kinds of personal projects bring others. So I know exactly what inspired others to put in the time to launch these three awesome projects:

Click to read more ...