Resumen del artículo: frente al tratamiento tan frecuentemente superficial que se aplica al tiempo, pocos contenidos hay tan locales y tan versátiles a la hora de dar contexto a muchas informaciones con el mínimo esfuerzo. Por otro lado, las noticias relacionadas con el tiempo cada vez escalan más posiciones en "lo más visto." Falta que los diferentes aspirantes a la categoría de líder local exploten bien sus posibilidades.
The weather isn’t poetry in a local site, it’s business. Its growing interest should insure that local portals pamper and nurture their weather content as one of their most valuable assets. Instead, a few clouds here, the current temperature there and a link to an external source very often proves the lack of interest put into them.
If a company organizing outdoor events consults a serious weather forecast site with a track record of over 60% correct predictions, it will save thousands by the end of the year. The more at stake the better the forecast, the closer the relationship of professional with the site. For the layman a weather forecast is sometimes desirable and on other occasions an absolute must. One thing is to go kite flying with your son and another is lugging your sofa in your pickup truck 30 miles to your new house. And as climate change grows world weather becomes less predictable and more and more people turn to reliable weather sources to plan their activities. One should think that Local News Sites would be the natural place where this information is to be found. Well, surprise…! Weather is considered by many news portals just filler taken for granted, even though weather news is more frequently found among the “Most Viewed Stories” of news portals. When weather becomes the news (hurricanes, snow storms…), many local sites fail to benefit from the full context information that would establish them as local leaders (and fail to attract the extra traffic generated on those special occasions)
Hundreds of weather sites are available on the internet (a selection of which can be found in 100topweathersites). Among them, of course, The Weather Channel. On the positive side, TWC is VERY thorough with tons of information related to weather: news, travel, driving, healthy living (it even includes a mosquito forecast!), sports and recreation, and its own Web TV. Data galore plus maps, graphs…etc. Weather Underground ups the ante and is even more complete, so much that… it is clearly a data provider (filling a page with loads of weather information). Is there anything local portals can do against these weather giants?
Good data providers have a tendency to offer their information in a very well designed setting…but very dully. Those portals are well done but a little cold at least for people used to more “human”, warmer settings in which content is presented in a more journalistic way. Besides, those databases usually lack context and internal references as well as lacking related news, current or historical. Just one example: when I enter the TWC page and I click on Seattle I’m sent to a “search result type of page”, a little Googlish, where I can choose among several results. You really have to want that weather report badly.
Large data aggregators, like the ones mentioned, treat all cities similarly. But reality is more complex: some cities have lakes and others don’t. In some cities the main worry is the wind, in others whether it will rain or not. Favorite leisure occupations are also another local element which determines priority of interests among users…etc. There are many specific local elements which are not covered by aggregators. Instead, local portals understand the city they serve and can have access to data local sources not easily available to the big fish. They are best prepared to bring forward the relevant elements among all the data provided, and make sense out of them.
If somebody in one of those network weather pages substituted the name of the city for another one you would need some time to realize you were in the wrong city! The Las Vegas Sun has realized that weather is a very local topic, a journalistic one, and has come up with a site that shows us the path to follow.
Comments