Note: This post was inspired by a conversation on twitter between Dave Cohn and Will Sullivan. You can work your way backwards through the conversation here.

The Internet is full of numbers. We can spend all day talking about how many people we follow on twitter, how much time people spend on our sites, what the growth rates are for all of our online properties. But a number is just a number if you don’t give it context.

I spend my life in numbers. I think about Bayesian inferences to help determine my menu selections at restaurants. I think about expected value formulas whether at a poker table or talking business and content strategies. I can’t read a book without breaking down arguments into symbolic logic.

But these are just things. I don’t want to talk about numbers when I talk about the Web.

I despise numbers not because they are useless, but because all too often we misuse these numbers.

A number like 30,000 absolute unique visitors per month means nothing to some people. It means dollars to others. Some think of it as audience. These may be truths, but they fail to accurately represent The Truth As I See It.

When you’re spouting off statistics like how many people subscribe to your YouTube channel or traffic your site gets, you should only think about one thing: There is a real human on the other side of the number.

Now, I don’t mean that you should go out and have lunch with the person on the other side of the network. I don’t even think anyone should expect you to respond to every email you get. I do, however, expect you to think about how you’ve made a human connection.

This Internet thing isn’t a broadcast machine. It looks like that on the surface, but that idea isn’t The Truth Of The Matter. The Internet is a phalanx of humans and human knowledge; It is big ideas and small ones at the same time. It is an extension of ourselves. For the most part we interact with Wikipedia as if it were a part of our own memory. We watch low production YouTube videos as if we were watching home movies.

Nearly every person that joins your network, that visits your site, that adds another notch on whatever metric you’re following is a real person trying to make a real connection. Don’t forget that.

When you see a number online, realize you made some kind of human connection. They interacted with you in some small way (the computer was just a conduit). Often in business, it is cheaper to keep a customer than to gain a new customer. That value applies to the Web more than anywhere else in business, I think.

Content itself isn’t valuable. What gives content value is the connection between the producer and the audience.

So what is more important; Is it the total number or the strength of the connections? If you have too many connections does that make each less valuable? I don’t know the answer. But it’s something to think about.

If there’s one thing I hate about newspaper writing it’s that we spend so much space repeating what we’ve already written.

If there’s two things I hate about newspaper writing it’s that we don’t spend enough space explaining what we’ve already written about.

We too often have a case of too much or too little.

This is why tagging your content matters so much.

I know it’s a simple thing, we see these little guys all the time on the Web, except on many news sites. It needs to be the top priority for your editorial strategies.

When you write a story about X subject and then follow up on X subject repeatedly, it’s incredibly useful for your readers to easily follow the history of the story or find related content. Those tags, not repeating paragraphs, add breadth to your content.

We still think in terms of sections as buckets. You have a news bucket and a business bucket and a lifestyle bucket and we cram content into one of those buckets, no matter how ambiguous the story may be. What if you have an article about the iPhone? It could fit in all three buckets. Plus a technology bucket, plus a bucket specifically for Apple, Inc. Tagging allows you put one piece of content into many buckets.

News has a short shelf life. Tagging every piece of content gives those older pieces new life, in context of the broader picture. It turns every article page into a targeted mini-homepage. It uses the power of databases to aid in relevant serendipity, meaning your users find extra information based on their interests that led them to that original item.

This seems so incredibly simple, so why don’t more news sites do it? Why are we still stuck thinking in terms of traditional section buckets?

The Las Vegas Sun recently launched a new Web site and I have a few criticisms. Overall, I think every paper in the country should find a way to emulate what the Sun is doing in terms of markup and general site design. I question a few other tactics.

The Good

Light use of photos and graphics makes the main graphics pop out and the page load extremely fast. Kudos.

The Sun has the most elegant markup I’ve seen on any current newspaper Web sites. With no inline styles, the table-less design will make re-skinning the site a snap down the road, should they feel the need to update. Separating content from format will save them months.

Item’s that need to be presented big are presented big, rather than simply on top. I love that the editorial picks share space above the fold with the constantly updated blogs that feed news throughout the day.

The Hi Def video looks beautiful. It’s well presented on both the homepage and the multimedia page. That you may download many videos in popular formats or embed them in your site is a step in the right direction.

The search! Simple yet powerful date span search aids in honing down keywords. Keywords are great for Google searches but news searchers generally seek specific items.

Human-readable URLs!

iCal exportable calendar!

The Bad

No ads? I love it, personally. But what a horrible business model! As of now, there seems to be no monetization strategy. That’s really bad news if you’re pushing video, let alone Hi Def video. Obviously an ad strategy will come, though I wonder how they came to the decision to roll out new site before building in ads. Seems silly to lose the revenue for no apparently good reason.

Feeds only exist for main sections, blogs and general comments throughout the site. But doesn’t some of that content overlap? I think we, as an industry, should be moving toward ever more granular feeds. As far as I can tell there aren’t any tags on news items. I’d like to subscribe to news, calendar events and blogs that only mention, say, McCarran airport.

The feeds are also partial text. Yuck.

Commenting requires registration. While a lot of anonymous comments amount to crap that must be moderated, a lot of good discussion comes from anonymous comments, too. I think the trade-off is worth it.

The Hi Def video sets you apart as far as a craft news goes, but what about commodity news? What about constantly feeding your site with brief video updates? Maybe the bloggers eventually do that, but I don’t see a site surviving on well produced Hi Def video alone. Not yet. Though, I really don’t know the Las Vegas broadband market well enough to comment. I do think the current strategy, while beautifully executed, feels old media. It lacks serious disruption against other competitors in the video arena.

The site, as of now, relies heavily on story-centric items. I’d like to see a solid push for database items. (For a start: There’s a LOT of money in Vegas, where is it all going?)

Update: Yoni Greenbaum just emailed this to me:

It looks like the lack of ads is the results of the JOA which has Las Vegas Review-Journal handling the advertising, circulation, production and marketing functions of the Sun, but having no involvement in the Sun’s website. In addition, the terms of the JOA “guarantees a second newspaper voice in the community”, so maybe online revenue is not a concern.

To be a child with cancer in the 1970s meant almost certain death. Then, one day, some smart pediatric oncologists got together and said this won’t work. We can’t sit here as individuals and expect to solve this problem.

They formed an association to trade ideas, tell others what works, what doesn’t work.

They formed a network.

Now about 90% of children survive cancer.

Being newspapermen or women alone in this world trying to figure it out on our own will mean almost certain death for many of our products.

We can’t expect a single ‘a ha’ moment turn profits around, to regain readers and viewers and our communities. There probably isn’t a silver bullet.

I’m going to push this hard in the newsrooms I interact with this year. We need to get out there and join in the conversations. We need to trade ideas, not just with each other, but with the public at large.

The Networked Journalism Summit this year was a start. Poynter plans to launch online groups. There are plenty of existing media groups on Facebook. While there’s certainly a lot of noise, there’s some excellent conversations happening on twitter.

If you’re just reading media blogs you’re doing yourself a disservice. Quit lurking in the digital shadows. Start commenting. Join these networks, join the discussion. Start a blog. It doesn’t matter if you write obits or you own a large network of newspapers. The point is to trade ideas. The flow of ideas outweighs the network of people in it.

This year we shouldn’t simply talk about what we should do. We should talk about what we’re doing. Let’s get into heated debates with each other because it needs to happen. Let’s be honest when we fail and when we triumph.

Besides starting this blog this year (and this one and this one and this one), I have to say despite all my screaming and yelling and general frustration, I’m pretty pleased with what’s been going on over the last 12 months.

Newspapers seem to be getting it. It’s slow going, for sure, but many newspapers now see the power of the Web. The greatest coups for online staffs have come from breaking news situations like the Virginia Tech shooting and the California fires. This is good. I’m not one for predictions, but I expect to see some really awesome stuff happening in 2008. I expect TV sites will finally start to come around to the Web and I expect many of them to fail miserably again. I expect to see more sites fully embrace simple technologies like RSS and I expect them to figure out how to monetize them. I expect to see a large blog network or two purchased by a traditional media powerhouse.

We’ve seen some truly great things happen in the world of community journalism, the smuggled Myanmar videos being the prime example. We’ve seen many newspapers hand local TV stations their asses with online video (and we can still do better). New York Times tore down their pay wall and they’ve only begun to see the benefits. Reporters and editors, although still somewhat begrudgingly have taken blogs under their wing.

Declining print readership and online advertising sales not making up the loss continue to concern publishers. Eventually those streams will cross. But only if we do things right this time. The fact remains that I can find breaking news faster on twitter and Wikipedia than the papers that supposedly serve the markets where these events occur. Omaha.com was a disaster to never be repeated. Pay walls unfortunately still block thousands, possibly millions of readers from content. Papers still fail to understand search engines. Papers have no idea whatsoever how to turn print-comparable profit on the Web. It’s still being sold like the print product. Site designs must improve. We can do better.

Believe it or not, this was my first full year as a full-time “web guy.” My background is in TV and before that, alternative print. If I can jump head-first into this, so can you. I hope publishers start to take the time to understand their “web guys.” Let’s make 2008 awesome.

Bismarck Tribune editor John Irby writes ‘Civility now required in our Web site postings.’ As a fellow North Dakotan and as a fellow Web journalist, I know just how stupid and racist and childish people can be on the Web.

Still. That’s no excuse for these words:

Censorship is not a dirty word. It isn’t always desirable, but it is sometimes necessary to prevent overly disturbing, painful, uncivilized or inappropriate thoughts or feelings from reaching consciousness. Censorship claims are sometimes charged by readers when parts or all of what has been submitted or gleaned is killed.

Or these words:

“Comments are reviewed for taste, tone and language before posting.” That warning has long been posted online, and our pledge will continue. But a new posting will also appear that sets a higher standard for publication. “… comments must adhere to some basic principles of public conversation … comments will not be posted that contain potential libel and slander, personal insults and name calling or profanity. Posts must be issue-orientated and civil.”

First of all, we’re not talking about censorship, per se. We’re talking about moderation. Irby: please put that in your lexicon next time you go on a rant against your readers.

Secondly, this is a misuse of technology. Irby even quotes the reason why in-house moderation of comments is a misuse of technology (though he doesn’t know it, yet):

Chris Satullo, editorial page editor of the Philadelphia Inquirer, said: “Newspapers are one of the four or five institutions in a community that help the community define itself. We’re part of the civic glue. We’re the place where the community thinks out loud.”

This is becoming increasingly less true as the Web forms clusters of like-minded people into communities about ideas, subjects, geographical location, among infinite other possibilities. Newspapers are shutting themselves out of the discourse.

Furthermore, top-down moderation (or ‘censorship’) is not the way to enforce community standards. You shouldn’t be the judge. The community should be.

If the community is getting unruly, let the community weed out the nonsense. Policing the chats will only eat away at your time and your sanity, particularly on hot-button issues.

There are other methods out there. Some are better than others, but all are better than inhibiting discussion.

• Ask your readers to use their real names.
• Ask your readers to provide you with an email address.
• Ask your readers to register an account.
• Moderate the users first post, then let the rest flow in.
• Add a ‘report this comment’ button to each comment.
• Create voting mechanisms similar to Digg or YouTube where crap falls below a viewing threshold.

But most importantly:

• Be a neighbor.
• Engage your community.
• Don’t dictate the rules of engagement.
• Don’t dictate the tone of the community.
• Don’t hinder your ability to let your community think out loud.

I know you’re trying to do what’s right for your site, but don’t do it under the thin veil of “community standards.”

Don’t be lazy.

Don’t be pompous.