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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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: [...]

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 [...]

The Chicago Tribune has the best presence I’ve seen of any newspaper on Facebook, Twitter and Digg. The paper created a persona based on former Tribune owner Robert Rutherford “Colonel” McCormick. See them here: Twitter | Facebook | Digg Creating accounts based on Colonel Tribune as opposed to simply creating a “Chicago Tribune” account humanizes [...]

Last night, this blog went mobile. And it only took about five minutes to set up (I even threw in an iPhone version for good measure). I already had an account with Mofuse, a free service that lets you create mobile sites using RSS feeds and manual links. You don’t have a whole lot of [...]

Paltalk is a web site that offers instant messaging, group video calls and chat rooms – all for free. How do I know this? Certainly not because I was searching for a solution to my instant messaging and group video needs. I know because I received this video via email:

Animoto is a great little service that takes photos, adds the music of your choice, and turns them into a music video. Here’s the company’s 50-word description: Animoto is a web application that, with the click of a button, produces videos using images and music that a user selects. Using their patent-pending Artificial Intelligence developed [...]

One huge advantage newspapers have over all of the competition is the quality of our photographs. So how do we take better advantage of that? Obviously producing daily or weekly or monthly “best-of” photo galleries makes sense. But here’s another idea: Tap into our vast archives of photos. Two photo galleries at DesMoinesRegister.com have accounted [...]