It's a great big world out there – or city, at least. Now available in one, easy-to-swallow site.
Stay connected to what's hot, see what's popular and what's not, and share with your friends and the community.
Everything but the kitchen sink – unless you're into that sort of thing. See what you want. Ditch what you don't. Your city, your friends, your site.
The Charlotte Observer has released charlotte.com into public beta. This is not intended to replace charlotteobserver.com, but rather to provide a place for the people of the Queen City to get Charlotte-specific content from multiple sources, and share this news with their social network at large. For those of you who have the The Charlotte Observer bookmarked as charlotte.com, you’ll want to update that bookmark.
Charlotte.com is, at its core, a feed crawler and news aggregator. We promote content from around the Internet dealing with Charlotte, classifying sources by category. It grabs summaries of articles, and lets users comment, share, and recommend them. You can exclude the categories and sources you don’t want to see, customizing your view into Charlotte’s news, blogs, tweets, etc. Construct a collection of topics and sources that you’re interested in reading.
Our goal is to provide a complete picture of Charlotte — restaurant reviews from Yelp, mentions from twitter, posts by local bloggers, national news mentioning the Queen City, event schedules and more — and give our users a means to discover and learn more about the city they call home.
We don’t have a complete list of what you want to see on charlotte.com yet, so if there’s a blog, news feed, image sharing group that you want to see promoted, drop us a line with the ‘Feedback’ link on the left hand side of the page. So long as it has an rss or atom feed, we can pull it in, and are happy to do so. We’ll be adding things constantly, and welcome your suggestions. We’re trying to get the whole picture of the #clt: businesses, people, culture, government — all of it. Help us fill in the gaps.
It’s a fair question.
When you log in, you’ll be presented with your primary landing page, presenting you with the most recently imported article summaries across all the categories you’re subscribed to. Articles are sorted in one of three ways: ’Recent’ sorts chronologically, ‘Recommended’ sorts by the best-liked, and ‘Popular’ by articles with the most activity — including well-liked and heavily discussed articles.
On the left, you have a category menu, from which you can select what you’re interested in reading. If there’s a category you’re not interested in, you can drop it from your list.
Each article summary has a link to the original article, a summary, and buttons for liking or discussing the article. We will be adding more options in the upcoming weeks. If you do not want to see any articles from a particular publisher, you can that source from your view by clicking the ‘X’ next to it.
Read the article, and if you like it, click the ‘Like This’ button. If you have something to say, ‘Discuss’ the article. As articles get discussed, liked, and shared, they will become more popular and will gain exposure to more readers.
The ‘Friends’ area will show you what articles are important to the people you follow on charlotte.com, via an activity stream. We chose this format since users of other social media will be familiar with it. You can add friends via the ‘Account Settings’ page link near your avatar.
The ‘Everyone’ list shows what’s popular across the entire site, regardless of whether not you’re subscribed to that category. There’s also an activity stream for all users on the right hand side of the page.
This is very much an experiment in local news aggregation — we are very interested in your feedback, suggestions, complaints. You can contact us with the “Feedback” link or twitter about us with the #cltcom hashtag. If there’s some way we can make the site more useful to you, let us know.
There’s a number of quirks on the site right now, and we’re mostly aware of them. We’re calling this a public beta because we’re not 100% yet. Grant us a little patience, and we’ll have the kinks ironed out as soon as we can — we’re deploying updates on the half hour.
(I’ll be updating this as we get questions in — @sfamiliar)
A: To give users a means to get back to charlotte.com. There’s a big ‘X’ on the right hand side of the frame to drop the bar, and there’s a ‘Show Url’ button. If enough users request this feature, we may add an option to disable this functionality via the user’s account settings page.
A: There’s a black ‘Feedback’ button on the left side of your browser. That’d be the place. We welcome all suggestions, feed nominations, etc. If there’s a bug with the feedback button, tweet about it with the #cltcom hashtag and we’ll pick it up. If the feedback button doesn’t work and twitter is failwhaling .. smoke signals.
A: We search for #clt and #charlotte on http://search.twitter.com
A: @sfamiliar is Ben Vandgrift (b.vandgrift at gmail), and @_ah is Adam Hunter (adamhunter at me). We’re the developers of charlotte.com, and don’t speak with the The Charlotte Observer’s official voice. We can generally speak to the how/when/why of the site, and can be engaged in that capacity. It’s nice to meet you all.
– bvandgrift / @sfamiliar
