Silver Surfer Day & Engaging News Communities

I mentioned yesterday that today, May 25, is Towel Day and National Missing Children Day.

UK Journaler Jan let me know that May 25 is also Silver Surfer Day... not this one, the other kind: Web users who happen to be older ("age-advantaged" is a phrase I saw somewhere).

There's also a Silver Surfer Week in September.

It's primarily a UK awareness campaign, though I saw the phrase come up in another context this week: British newspaper gets 'silver surfers' blogging -- it's about the new community offerings of the British newspaper Telegraph, on their My Telegraph site.

What they're doing is similar to the new community features on the USA Today site -- users can build profiles and blogs on the site.

On one level, one wonders why anyone would build a blog on a newspaper site. But when you think about it, it makes sense -- you've got a built-in audience, the people are clustering around common interests, and they've always got common topics to talk about (responding to the news stories).

Here's a quote from the My Telegraph community manager, Shane Richmond:

"Our primary audience is people who read the Telegraph and have not so far tried blogging. There are plenty of them. Typically, they are too inexperienced or too busy to start blogging elsewhere. And then there's the question of audience - we can't all be Robert Scoble or Mike Arrington - when an ordinary person starts a blog, nobody shows up. We have offered encouragement and delivered an extremely simple but very powerful blog platform. More important than that, however, is the fact that we’ve delivered an audience. If people show up at My Telegraph with something to say, there is someone there who will read them and comment."

So the users get easy tools, a platform to voice their opinions and a community of like-minded people, and the newspaper site gets increased user engagement and traffic.

I will have to check in with our News folks and see what we're doing in this space. I've seen a lot of Journals that were created using the "Blog This" feature, published with one entry, and never touched again. That seems like we could be doing something better to get people talking to each other and keeping up their blogs.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: silver surfer day, blogging, social media, mytelegraph, news community

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Silver Surfer Day & Engaging News Communities