Brooke Moira Diary

KARE11, the local NBC affiliate in Minneapolis is taking on a new thing — a thirty minute television program with a significant online presence. Titled “KARE11 OnLive” [clever, that] this program boasts a website that is as integral to the program as the video cameras.

The site features blogs by the two hosts [one of them a high-profile personality with the station for some time] as well as blogs from at least one other contributor. The blogs are comment-ready, but not syndicated via RSS feeds. A bulletin board receives contributions from the audience as well, based on topics created by the program producers. Users cannot create topics on the BBS, only the producers can do that; this was likely done to maintain a focus on the topics the program tackles.

The appearance of the site it completely independent of the primary KARE11 site. A fresh, thoroughly modern aesthetic lends an of-the-moment feel to the project. A player auto-plays the most recent program upon entrance. The style is applied to all elements of the page, and sets it apart from the advertisements on the page–a tough thing to do.

The on-air portion explicitly reinforces the online component; when the program goes to a commercial break, they say, “We are going to take a commercial break, but the discussion continues online.” At certain points in the show they refer to the person who is “manning the website” replete with headset microphone. This staffer reads comments from the BBS on topics mentioned earlier in the show.

Reminds me a bit of what Radio Open Source did.

This is a significant effort on the part of KARE11; it will be interesting to see how popular it becomes. It airs at a bit of an odd time, 4pm CT. They have a hook, and that is the local angle. Will that be enough?

Farecompare.com is a new site that displays airfare data. I heard about them a while back when they only had RSS feed to fares on city pairs. With the new site re-design, they have added many features and the site looks awesome. There have a whole bunch of cool, new tools like Google Desktop Plug-in, Apple and Yahoo widgets, Firefox extension, and Google Maps mashups (similar to Travelocity dream maps).

Although not a meta-search, the site includes all the fares filed by ATPCO, which is the same form of data used on GDS systems (Sabre, Worldspan,Galileo, and Amadeus) that includes Expedia (Worldspan), Travelocity (Sabre), and Orbitz (ITA)). On the home page, fares are listed for top destinations in 6 continents. The site will allow you to eyeball general airfares around the world out of your home airport without plugging in dates. You can drill down by year, month, or week for a general comparison. The general navigation is organized, but I think few clicks from screen to screen can be minimized.

There are no advertisements on the site except for some deep links to airlines and sites like Orbitz, which may or may not be paid. I know the founders have an APTCO fare management background and could have ties with them. Beyond that I have no information on their business model.

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