From time to time I write on the economics of paid content on NetNoir.com. As NetNoir.com moves into more regular production of articles and opinion, I have had to deal with the daunting aspects of creating a strong revenue model.  During the course of the research I often read about the struggles that newspapers are having –trimming costs and increasing revenue.

As a result, I think that newspapers really need to focus strongly on providing great local news content, and stop spending significant amounts of money on opinion, even syndicated opinion, which is often the worst type of warmed over mushy opinion.

Instead, newspapers should be allowing local people to talk about local issues, views and ideas in order to improve the integration between the local environment and the newspaper’s service to the community.

We’ve got the new NetNoir.com logo hot off the press!

As we have said earlier, this site is gradually going to go through a process of uprgrades during the next three to four months. After our flagship site is running smoothly, NetNoir.com will get a full revision.

Evidently AOL.com is interested in promoting more differentiation on their main African American oriented vertical BlackVoices.com. Although BlackVoices can be considered the second oldest African American oriented site on the web. [Editor NetNoir.com is arguably the First Vertical African American site.] Their style and substance has not changed much in the last 5 years — despite the ample pocketbook of Time Warner (now Aol.com alone).

Update I:

“TheBVX is scheduled for a soft launch next Wednesday.” per BlackVoices.com own message board.

[...]

Hello All!

Currently we are having trouble with our WordPress installation. Hopefully we will get that fixed in the next day, and begin to eliminate some of the missing page errors that you might be experiencing.

Thanks

admin

Progress?

Minor Set-back.

I have somehow destroyed the some server configuration files and thus not only made the site slower, but managed to make a bunch of pages show 404 status.  I’m going to try to go through each configuration option for another hour; however, after an hour has passed I’m going to have to move onto to other work.

So, if you notice a page or two (or hundred) suddenly being unavailable, that is the error I’m trying to fix

thanks!

Your lowly NetNoir.com admin.

Today I have made a bit of progress on two fronts of development.

First, I have been able to finish installing the last plug-ins needed into this wordpress installation.  WordPress is an amazing content management platform in its own right — it really goes beyond merely a blog package at this point. The user interface is extremely friendly, and there is a wealth of plug-ins available to extend the basic package.  However, that also makes for a somewhat disjointed system, as many plug-ins have somewhat overlapping features.

Second, I have been working on some core server administration duties; however, even though I have spent a day working on the systems I have yet to get the things working!

Your team at NetNoir has been up late at night working on great new content for both NetNoir.com and the mystery site.  As a result I am personally just now getting into the groove of things today, and getting ready to do some additional development work.

As a result, several things are likely to occur next week:

1. We will try to start regular news postings on Net Noir.
2. The “mystery” site will go live, and will start being updated.
3. The design of Net Noir will also begin to change a bit.

Also, if you do feel the need to contact the admin, please e-mail me at admin-netnoir.com  @ kotokogroup.com.

I’m hard at work updating various bits of information to get Netnoir.com going again. I think this post may be the first in a series of meta-informational posts about getting the site up and running.

Up until this point we have put a great deal of effort into finishing our main site (with some snooping around you can find our main site).  As a result, NetNoir.com will have to do with a very basic design at first, and as well as word press as a cms as opposed to our usual development platform.

So, do not get too attached to this design — we are likely to change it in a few months