Peoria.com looks to be an improvement over other portals
Via a post from PeoriaIllinoisan, I’ve seen what the new Peoria.com is going to be all about. It’s another portal page, this one owned and operated by the Kosmin Media Group, a company that does this sort of thing, including this site for Kingwood, Texas.
Note: Kosmin’s slogan is “Making the Web Local.” Kosmin is located in Houston, Texas. That’s some local.
As PI points out, these guys seem to be paying attention to blogging, as they have a modest blogroll on their community forum page. The forum page in Kingwood seems fairly active, although I didn’t read many of the posts. I can see such a forum site becoming quite popular hear, as long as it’s moderated with a gentle hand. I would suggest an even longer blogroll, ‘because there are a lot of bloggers in Peoria.
The forum and blogroll separate the Peoria.com effort from others that I’ve written about before. This new Peoria.com most resembles the Chamber of Commerce’s DiscoverPeoria.com, which I do find somewhat useful as it has links to the day’s news and local public station’s streaming audio. I’ve found the Creative Logic’s Greater Peoria Region’s Virtual Community to be too enamored with animation to be useful. Molleck Publications’ PeoriaInfo.com site doesn’t seem to exist any more.
My advice in general for portal pages is this: Don’t be static. Folks might stumble upon a site once or twice and find of an interesting link, but they won’t return unless they come to expect fresh content when they visit. Don’t rely on RSS feeds from news sites to provide that fresh content. Put new stuff on it every day. Partner up with bloggers and/or news organizations.
Billy Dennis is a former reporter and editor at small daily and weekly newspapers in Illinois and Missouri. He comments on media, news and politics. He also owns and operates 
Billy,
I see that they at least know who you are:
Woah there…not so fast.
Peoria.com will launch Jan. 1st, 2007!
In the meantime, check out these clever buggers…
Peoria Illinoisan
Peoria Pundit
At least they didn’t call us “clever buggerers.”
Not that there’s anything WRONG with that.
It’s about time they do something with this domain. Jim E. has owned it for almost 10 years. It’s good to see it finally going somewhere.