Chris Snider

Here’s what caught my eye online in the past week:

• From 10,000words.net: 6 ways to create a mobile version of your site.

• Addictomatic creates a custom page with the latest buzz on any topic.

• The Des Moines Register posted our annual pumpkin carving stencils (including Obama, McCain and Palin).

• I’m digging the way trulia.com lets me research real estate. Here are recently sold houses in my neighborhood.

• Journerdism’s career rut crusher will help anyone thinking about (or forced to thing about) a new job.

• Six exceptional web-based image editors, from 6 Revisions.

• Want to get the same username on as many web sites as possible? The username check will see what’s available on popular social sites.

We all want to boost our rankings in search engines. Fortunately, there are a lot of tools out there to help us achieve that goal.

Keyword suggestion tools (tell you how often people search for your keyword – and how often they search for similar keywords):

• Wordtracker’s free keyword suggestion tool. Click on the little chart icon (after you do a search) to find out how many sites are optimized for that word or phrase – and how much traffic a No. 1 ranking generates.
• SEOBook’s keyword suggestion tools. Gives you a ton of info, including estimated search volumes on Google, Yahoo!, and MSN.
• Google’s traffic estimator tells you how your keywords will perform in Google search.

Tools to test your site’s SEO:

• Website Grader gives your site an overall SEO score.
• Term target helps determine how well targeted your site is for certain words.
• Keyword Density Analyzer shows how often keywords appear on your page – vs. how often they compare to your competitor’s page.

Want more info?

• Here’s a list of SEO blogs from alltop.
• Think you know all there is to know about SEO? Take this quiz.
• 21 ways to boost your SEO away from your site.
• Seomoz has a wealth of tools. So does seo.com.
• Maybe you’d rather watch a video.
• Oh, and compete.com has a lot of great tools.

Are there other SEO tools you find valuable?

Are you trying to go green but you don’t want to give up your magazine subscriptions? Zinio.com allows you to view the pages of hundreds of magazines right on your computer screen

And their current Read Green initiative lets you try out a subscription to one of those magazines for free.

I tried out Hawaii magazine, because I am planning a trip to Hawaii this winter. Here’s what the pages look like:

For a magazine like this, the ads are just as much content to me as the articles, so I appreciated being able to read the magazine in this format.

As we all strive to be more green and continue to offer more and more specialty publications, it might be worth looking at a partnership with Zinio.

The Chicago Cubs opened what I hope will be a long run in the 2008 baseball playoffs Wednesday night. Which gave me a chance to check out how a couple of my favorite newspapers handle big, live sporting events online.

Chicago Tribune

Live coverage: The core of the Trib’s live coverage was it’s From the Cubicle column (which has been around for at least a couple years now), offering entertaining play-by-play of the game. Photos from Trib photographers were posted during the game. And a live scoreboard was added to the home page.

Reader interaction: Readers could add their comments at the bottom of the Cubicle column.

My thoughts: The Tribune appeared to pretty much play this straight – offering the same experience it did for Cubs games all season long (but with a bigger splash on the home page). Maybe they’re waiting for the World Series, but it would have been nice to have at least seen some updates from Colonel Tribune on Twitter.

Chicago Sun-Times

Live coverage: They offered a live chat for readers using CoverItLive. They promoted blog updates and Twitter updates from the home page, but neither were being updated as the game was in progress (only saw one Tweet). There was a live scoreboard on the home page, but it stopped working halfway through the game and appeared to be replaced with an ad (see image below).

Reader interaction: The live chat allowed readers to chat, read what others had to say and vote on in-game polls.

My thoughts: Even though I am a big fan of CoverItLive, this chat didn’t work for me. It felt like there were too many people commenting, so it was difficult to follow along. Maybe having a sportswriter or columnist in the chat offering thoughts/analysis of the game would have helped (or maybe they had that and I missed it amid all the comments).

Maybe the Sun-Times felt the same way, because they didn’t leave the whole chat online, just some excerpts.

My favorite thing was that they quickly wrote and posted a story about the fan who caught DeRosa’s home run ball.

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For fun, I looked at boston.com and latimes.com to see what they were doing live for the late game. They weren’t doing much, but both have partnered with Jacked to offer live scoring of games. I had never head of Jacked, but I was impressed. I already have an email into them to talk about a partnership with DesMoinesRegister.com.