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Geolocation meets deals

Last news first. Facebook announced today that it will be doing more with its location feature, including offering deals tied to location. This could spell trouble for other geolocation providers like Foursquare and Gowalla, group buying sites like Groupon and, sadly, news sites looking for revenue streams. Facebook is offering these deals for free right now – and who’ll buy the proverbial cow through the likes of us when they can get the milk for free from Facebook?

A consumer/business side take on Facebook Places from D.C. blogger Lisa Byrne at DCEventJunkie outlines the potential on the local level. Facebook seem to have a lot of options for businesses of many sizes and kinds (including charities) to take advantage of the deal service.

Paywalls busted

Also today, GigaOm declares It’s Official: News Corp.’s Paywalls Are a Bust. NewsCorp’s Times (in London) lost 90% of its online traffic after putting up a paywall earlier this year. Somehow, they paint this as success, as they see a smaller online audience that is paying for their service as better than a large one getting it for free. Advertisers, it seems, disagree.

Election Experiments

I blogged here about what TBD was doing for elections (will update today with how that all turned out).The Nieman Lab and Lost Remote documented what news organizations around the country were doing to cover the 2010 election using news media and social media tools. Some great ideas in these posts from the likes of the Huffington Post, NPR and Washington Post.

More Adventures in Storify

Speaking of newsroom experiments, we at TBD are still in love with the tool. Burt Herman, who created the tool, was in the office Monday to tell us a few tips and tricks as well as take suggestions for improvements. Burt is awesome. We’ve been trying it in lots of different instances and news situations. Here’s a few of them:

• Events: A narrative of the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear on the National Mall Oct. 30.
• Sports: TBD tried a crowdsourced fan game story follows the ups and downs of fan reactions during the Oct. 31 Redskins-Lions game. Great idea for use in sports coverage from my coworker Dan Victor.
• Breaking News: A quick gathering of Twitpics and eyewitness reports from a fire at rush hour in D.C.’s Logan Circle neighborhood.
• Elections: A curated stream of election day tweets and photos from the D.C. area  and an accompanying narrative of how things played out on election night in three key races.

Online News Association Conference

This was my first ONA conference and I was lucky to have it be in D.C. I volunteered, so I didn’t see many panels, but I was on the Friday keynote panel about TBD’s launch. Since I don’t have great notes, here’s some posts that summed up a lot of the conference’s highlights.

• TBD coworker Jeff Sonderman has compiled a boatload of session videos on his blog.
• Christopher Wink took some great notes from many session. Check ’em out.
• The Nieman Lab recaps Friday’s sessions in tweets.
• Poynter’s Mallory Tenore has 5 key takeaways from ONA.
• MediaShift outlined notable moments from the events in quotes and notes from the panels. It includes great insights from NPR, AOL – and some familiar names at TBD.
• Ryan Thornburg had my favorite post about ONA, for admittedly self-centered reasons (he calls me the “Mike Allen of TBD”).

On Jobs (also ONA)

I sat for an interview Friday at ONA with Kent State student Nicole Stempak about journalism jobs for college grads. She asked me to explain how I’ve been fortunate enough to create my own positions in social media and online news since I left college. A few people asked me to share it, so I’m posting it here.