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New-look KUAM.com features heavy RSS, real-time user searches, streaming bliss
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by Jason Salas, KUAM News
Monday, May 01, 2006
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KUAM Video requires Flash 8.
download it Here.
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Hopefully by the time you've read this (assuming you're accessing this article via traditional web browsing and not from an RSS feed, through a mobile device, an e-mail newsletter, or through any of the other ways we publish data online) you'll have noticed our site's new look and feel. If you're a part of our KUAM.com Beta Tester Community, you've been playing with the new UI for our site for several weeks now.
This is all part of KUAM's new image: Guam's News Network. It's more than just a tagline, slogan or clever marketing device - it's a commitment to bringing you the best possible coverage of Guam news so that you can access us anywhere, anytime and on any device. It represents our philosophy on multiplatform content delivery - from top to bottom, KUAM is dedicated to bringing you our daily news in our integrated, award-winning "On-Air. Online. On Demand." fashion. Seamlessly across radio, television and the Internet, we're here for you.
And just a hint: everything we've added is the direct result of your feedback. All the work we've done is the byproduct of talking to users and finding out what they (dis)like about our site and our online services and tweaking them to fit your needs. You access our stuff multiple times everyday, so the least we can do is make your online experience with us fast, nice-looking, and convenient.
New Features
The centerpiece of our redesigned site is our new KUAM Video Player. You'll need Flash 8 installed on your PC, and I surely hope you do, because there's magic going on in that little box. We've extended our mammoth library of video to let you get the news in the way most appropriate for your lifestyle at the atomic level - individually instead of via the whole cast. Also, links appear beside each clip letting you know if you can find more information in a published web story/exhibit, and/or download a portable copy of the clip to take with you or copy onto your digital media device for later playback.
If you want to watch an entire newscast, you can still see each night's show, beginning to end, in our Streaming Webcast Archive. And you can still download portable copies of individual stories, segments and specials for your iPod, Sony PSP, for burning to CD, or just for offline viewing on your PC with KUAM Broadband, or get automatic delivery of our latest content to your digital device in our podcasts, or check us out in Google Video. And now, KUAM Video Player lets you comfortably jump ahead to any production we've done - in the order you want it - watch it from our homepage, and get on with your life.
You'll be able to see stories, breaking news, specials, and web-only content you're not going to find anywhere else. Not even on KUAM's other media properties. Again, you asked for it.
Our new LiveSearch feature (the gray box beneath the lead story on our homepage) lets you see what your fellow 'Netizens are searching for in the massive KUAM News Archives. Some results might be fairly obvious based on the day's top headlines, some might be surprising, some might be downright shocking. But it's real. You can also subscribe to RSS feeds to see real-time what people are looking up.
On that note, you'll notice that we're pushing RSS very heavily. We pioneered syndicated online content locally, and we've gotten lots of positive responses about the RSS feeds we publish. And evidently, you want more. So, we've put more content-specific feeds online for you to plug into your aggregator program. Subscribe to one...or them all! Heck, you can get the entire contents of our site without ever visiting it again! (But I still hope you do.)
Additionally, we've added all the current day's headlines to the bottom of all of our article pages, eliminating the need for you to keep clicking your browser's 'Back' button to advance through the day's top stories.
So take a few minutes to have a look around at our new digs. Familiarize yourself with our new layout and figure out how to get at your favorite content areas. I hope you like what we've done with the place. (If you'd like to take a nice leisurely stroll down Amnesia Lane and want to see the designs previously used on earlier incarnations of our homepage, check out the Internet Archive Wayback Machine for a nice refresher.)
If you've got any comments about KUAM.com, as always, I'd love to hear from you. I enjoy the occasional bit of praise, but I really value criticism.
It's what got us here in the first place.
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