Chris Snider

It was a big news day yesterday. Not necessarily big news here in the trenches in Des Moines. But a big news day nationally.
Which gave us a good chance to see how the big boys played the bailout news online. Here’s a look at home pages from USA Today, The Washington Post, The New York [...]

Today, we celebrate simple.
The web site Umbrella Today breaks your weather report down to one simple questions – do I need an umbrella today?
Type in your zip code, and you’ll get a giant NO (you don’t need an umbrella) or a YES (you do need an umbrella).

You can even sign up to receive a text [...]

We had visitors from Apple (yes, that Apple) in Des Moines this week to demo their Podcast Producer software. The Apple folks wanted to show us (and some representatives from Gannett) how media outlets could use Podcast Producer to speed up their workflow for video and audio programs.
Whether or not we ever decide to use [...]

I’m one week into a six-week course on search engine optimization, which means we’ve barely learned the difference between a search engine and a directory. But I wanted to pass along five valuable lessons I’ve learned so far.
1. The top 5 search engines receive more than 90 percent of all search traffic. They are: Google, [...]

Before you drop $600 on a copy of Photoshop CS3 for that designer or copy editor on your staff, you might want to consider what you can do for free with the online photo editing site photoshop.com.
The site has been in beta testing for months now, but officially launched last week. Once you upload your [...]