Yesterday, the Argus Leader announced that they will be moving toward a subscription model for their online content. Readers no longer will be able to visit ArgusLeader.com and expect to be able to read all the content for free. I didn't visit the website too often, but I'll miss the freedom to come and go as I please without being an online subscriber.

By now, most of us and have seen this paywall subscription model being offered by various news sources. Until recently, subscriptions were required from some larger print publications but rarely were part of the local or regional online news ecosystem. When a paper from a relatively small city such as Sioux Falls, SD moves in this direction it isn't difficult to acknowledge this as the trend we'll be seeing followed by more newspapers in the coming years. The move toward a subscription model was inevitable, as research as shown time and time again that publications haven't seen the same revenue through online advertisement as they once did in the print media world of yesterday.

Revenue from online ads for niche sites like mine that have little overhead is enough. But real publications producing high quality content on a wider scope have genuine revenue concerns when providing you their content. Randell Beck of the Argus Leader acknowledged this in Sunday's edition of this paper.

Five years ago, my wife and I had a dream. Together, we wanted to start a blog called "Like that Idea" and so we registered the domain LikethatIdea.com. The idea for the WordPress blog was to have a site where we could identify and review neat ideas which we thought others would like to read about. The ideas came in the form of products, books, movies, services, and interesting article that we read ourselves. In the end though, we ran out of ideas to write about and the site never really took off.

By the time many of you read this post, Like that Idea will be never more. I'm currently working on wiping the site off the server. It's time to say goodbye to one of the few joint Internet projects that my wife and I worked on together. Instead, we'll use the time to work on our own personal projects as well as working jointly on the biggest project of our lifetime, our family. If you're wanting to purchase the domain, feel free to make us an offer.

Below the fold is a post I couldn't help but transfer from LikethatIdea.com over to this site. Thinking back at this moment in time still puts a smile on my face.

My local newspaper, the Argus Leader, contains an article about Twitter fever finally arriving in Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  The start of the article is interesting to read.

Following blogs online takes too much time. So Mike Vetter, 24, uses Twitter to keep up with friends and follow the short posts or "tweets" by people in his business.

"Twitter is called microblogging - small blogs - only up to 140 characters at a time," says Vetter, CEO of DataSync, a Sioux Falls software company. "If I were to follow 50 people blogging, I would be reading all day long. This way I can get the point, boiled down. It's blogging for lazy people."

Isn't that ironic?  When blogging first became popular some of the criticisms bloggers heard was that blogs were too short and not polished enough.  The thought was that blog posts would never hold the same attention by readers compared to real articles and stories written elsewhere.  Now we forward forward to the present and we find that blogs contain too many words which is what spurring the Twitter movement.  The length of a tweet is limited by 140 characters (roughly about the same as a text message in a cell phone).

Following this line of thought, I'm now convinced that by the time my five year old son becomes a teenager he'll call Twitter too inefficient.  Instead his generation and their even shorter attention span will require you to send messages at 7 characters or less.  What would we call this new service, Twit?

After three decades of embracing technology, I think I finally arrived between the old way and the new ways of doing things.  My case in point, I found this article in the print version of my Sunday newspaper.  At the same time, I'm ready to read what you think of the article via my Twitter account.

A month ago, I started observing an increase in traffic from a relatively new aggregation site called Alltop.  CMS Report is now being featured in Alltop's content management page which is dedicated to "all the top content management news".  Alltop recently expanded the number of topics they cover and I surmise that content management is one of those new topics.   While there are already a number of news aggregation sites referring their readers back to CMSReport.com (and if you're one of them...we thank you), Alltop is special.     

What makes Alltop so special? First of all, the site is a project associated with Guy Kawasaki.  Guy Kawasaki has a history with Apple but he is one of those successful IT guys with so much confidence in himself that his time at Apple alone doesn't define him.  If you check out his blog on a regular basis you'll come to understand what I'm trying to write here.

Secondly, Alltop is special because it was developed by a neighbor, Electric Pulp.  Electric Pulp is based in my city, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  I don't know what it is, but there seems to be a lot of successful tech companies with national presence to be found in Sioux Falls.  Go figure that one out.

Augustana College, a United States college affiliated with the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is using Drupal.  According to Augustana's Web Editor the site was developed by Tim Broeker of Electric Jet (Mnpls) using Drupal 5.  Electric Pulp, a local Sioux Falls company, also contributed to the project by doing the design and CSS work.

I don't think I've ever met Tim Broeker, but what is interesting about this Drupal site developer is that he also has a Joomla! Core Team connection.  Yes indeed, open source does matter.

One of the biggest unknowns for those of us that live in the north central United States...how many Drupal enthusiasts are there in our area?  Not knowing the answer to this question has been bothering me.  I have also been a little disturbed seeing the map so empty of a Drupal user group for my part of the region.  So I'm hoping those of you that are Drupal users from South Dakota and bordering areas will join me and others in the new South Dakota Drupal User Group at groups.drupal.org.

This is a group for those in the state of South Dakota and and the border areas of South Dakota who are interested in Drupal! The number of Drupal users in our area may be small, but our numbers are steadily increasing. Lets get together and chat about all things Drupal whether you are a Drupal user, developer, or Web designer.

Could we have enough people for a Drupal meet-up?  Stay tuned...

It is not often that I use this site to talk about non-CMS or non-Tech, but I have to get this off my chest. Seeing four inces of snow on the ground in April does not make those that love summer happy. We had four inches of snow here, but other parts of South Dakota received more than a foot of snow. In other words, I can't complain too much, but I still hold the right to complain a little! The good news is that most of the snow has melted with only a few snow drifts still left in the yard.

Seeing this much snow during the last weeks of April isn't unheard of in the norhtern plains, but it doesn't happen too often. I think the last time I saw this much snow in April was in 2004. For the meteorologists at heart, the National Weather Service in Sioux Falls has a good explanation for show these type of winter weather storms develop in April.

I have to admit that when someone submits a story and I trust them...I sometimes don't read the whole article before I publish it.  So until I read Dean Barker's Gadgetopia, I didn't realize his company, Blend Interactive, was featured in eZ's SHARE! magazine.  The irony is that if I had read an article posted at my own site by one of eZ System's own people...Dean's post wouldn't have been new news to me.  Sigh, I have been just too busy...

You may not have heard of Blend Interactive, but they do sport a decent portfolio of sites they have developed and designed.  Probably the most likely well known work from the company is the home site for the instant messaging client, Pidgin.  The SHARE! magazine features Blend Interactive, in part, because it is one of the most enthusiastic users of the eZ Publish CMS in the United States.  eZ Publish's roots is in Norway and the software is more popular in Europe.  But, as the eZ article implies, there is a push to generate more users in the United States.

MySiouxFalls.com is a new and local online news source for the city where I currently reside, Sioux Falls, South Dakota.  At first, I was not all that excited about the site and had not plan on mentioning the MySiouxFalls.com site here at CMS Report.  We've all seen these sites before, right?  In fact, I would say that many of the visitors to this blog likely have designed or participated in building sites similar to MySiouxFalls.com.  That's not to say that there are not some things from a content management perspective worth mentioning.
 

Open source fans likely would have interest in knowing that the site runs Joomla! for it's content management system.  Weather buffs who border on the geeky side also might find interest that much of the site's weather graphics are provide by HAMweather.  HAMweather provides weather-related products and services (some of it for free) and in my opinion produces some of the best "custom" graphics derived from the National Weather Service's NDFD.  While the site's software has caught my attention, for a change it is something else that has caught my attention.  After visiting the site a few times and a chain of events, I suddenly realized that sites such as MySiouxFalls, NowPublic, and The Register are slowly changing my habits as a news reader.

Dean Barker from Gadgetopia is throwing the idea of a meetup for bloggers in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Dean writes:

This is not a large-scale formal endeavor. We’re just looking to take over a coffeehouse for a couple of hours and discuss the state of blogging in Sioux Falls (and the surrounding area), and the common problems we face.

Personally, I like the idea of an informal endeavor as I often prefer round-table discussions over formal presentations. If you have an interest in attending such a meetup, you can either send Dean an e-mail at editors@gadgetopia.com and/or send him a comment from his original post.

CNET recently posted an article about how the cost differences between DSL and Cable is changing how people decide which Internet service is best for them. There was a time when DSL and Internet Cable were price competitive and we just looked more at the specs in deciding which way to go. But the market is changing:

A new kind of digital divide is emerging in the U.S. broadband market. On one side are middle-income and price-sensitive households, which tend to favor DSL service offered by phone companies. On the other are more affluent families, which gravitate toward higher-speed cable modem services." Read More at CNET

I actually started out with DSL almost seven years ago. Unlike the larger cities, here in Sioux Falls, South Dakota our communication infrastructure is small enough that we can quickly absorb new technology at a much faster pace than larger cities. We had DSL and Internet Cable a couple years before most of the folks living in such places as Los Angeles or even Kansas City went broadband. Broadband service through the local cable company, Midcontinent Communications, wasn't too far behind and eventually I switched my broadband service over to them.