Ten Philadelphia competitors and their January Web traffic

Click to enlarge.

Perhaps one of the most influential realities of the Web is metrics. The details of traffic and audience online have so rapidly become expansive that they have likely not yet been entirely harnessed.

Arguments still rage around the accuracy and importance of a myriad of Web analytics, but, away from page views, an increasing standard is to compare sites by their monthly unique visitors, though that number’s efficacy has no doubt come into question.

Until now, very little attention has been paid publicly to comparing Philadelphia’s many competitors by way of traffic comparison. With the first numbers for 2010 released this month by public Web analytics company Compete, Technically Philly decided to compile the first such digest.

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Friday Q&A: Keith McGinnis on Philadelphia Weekly’s free Happy Hour Guide app

No one is suggesting that iPhone applications are going to save legacy media. But the conversation so often turns to profitability on mobile platforms, that it may be a surprise there are so  few truly local products from Philadelphia media.

NBC10 and 6ABC have free apps developed with the help of their national parents. Shopiks offers Philly coupons, and there’s the popular Philadelphia Concert Hub.

A screenshot of the app's interface. Click to enlarge.

“The rest are tour guides, canned content, RSS readers of Philly feeds or some sort of national content that is supposed to relate to our area,” says Keith McGinnis, who recently left a role heading up IT for Review Publishing, whose flagship brand is Philadelphia Weekly.

In December, PW likely made the region’s strongest big media play into mobile by launching a McGinnis-led Philly Happy Hour Guide application for the iPhone and iPod touch. The application offers users the chance to search and find the best happy hour deals at specific locations, specific bars, specific neighborhoods or wherever is nearest. There are options for calling a cab, getting directions and tracking just what’s your favorite.

Last month, the app became free to use, after a paid trial version, and so now, McGinnis says, PW has an excellent opportunity to test the waters of localized mobile profitability, ahead of anyone else in Philadelphia (No particular provision is being made for the few hundred who paid $1 for the app, McGinnis says, “I figure you saved $1 on your first drink special.”)

McGinnis is now joining the staff of Northern Liberties Web development firm o3world, but the Happy Hour Guide is still close enough to his heart that he took the time to chat with Technically Philly about how the app plans on making money, how it got made and what it means for PW’s always active competition with crosstown rival CityPaper.

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Best of Philly nods to our community from Philadelphia magazine

The August issue of Philadelphia magazine has its annual and ever-popular Best of Philly awards, edited this year by Michael Callahan. It will come as no surprise that lot’s of familiar faces pop up, including a number from our creative communities of technology and innovation.

Below, we breeze through the names you just might stumble upon at the next community event.

• In the “ENJOY” section, the all-comedy acting company 1812 Productions gets the nod as the city’s best Theatre group. We’ve covered their work for an iPhone app about Abraham Lincoln to promote the Rosenblach Museum.

See seven others from the magazine’s nearly 300 listings after the jump.

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Technically Not Tech: Joystiq

It may seem that Joystiq is located in some fancy tower in some far-off city with a staff of a dozen writers. After all, the blog is owned by the largest media company in the world, is the 18th most popular blog on the Web and is one of the largest video game blogs in the world. And, as one look in Google Reader would tell you, they produce a boat load of breaking news, reviews and industry rumors that put traditional video game media outlets to shame.

But Joystiq is the result of a team of telecommuters from all over the world led by Philadelphia’s own Christopher Grant, who plugs away at the site in his Fishtown home with the help of his staff. Two staffers, Ben Gilbert and Dave Hinkle, live in and around Philadelphia as well.

While most large multi-author blogs do not have a true “headquarters,” Philadelphia has long had its impact on Joystiq. The man who Grant replaced and the site’s first editor, Vladimir Cole, was a graduate student at Wharton.

We chatted with Joystiq’s Editor-in-Chief about his climb to the top of Joystiq and found out who was lucky enough to receive four boxes of free video games from him.
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North Philly YouTube stars unhappy with PW exposure

Makael Mclendon (left) and Kevin Simmons are The Skorpion Show

There’s a funny thing about this whole “new media” thing that journalists can’t stop talking about. Now, story subjects can answer back.

Such is the case with Joel Mathis’s profile of North Philly-based The Skorpion Show for the publication’s “Queer Issue.” The day after the article ran, Skorpian’s Keven Simmons shared his distaste with 9,000 of the show’s subscribers.

“Now I know how those reality stars feel … this will never happen again,” he said.

The Skorpion Show is a DIY talk show where Kevin Simmons and Makael Mclendon, better known as Skorpion and Makael, chat about everything from celebrities to relationship issues to music reviews. Each video typically features the hosts sitting side-by-side chatting into their Logitech webcam.

Each episode averages around 4,000 views, which when stretched over 185 videos, adds up. Two of the duo’s videos have broken the one-million viewer mark.

After the story was published, The Skorpion Show uploaded two videos pertaining to the PW story. Follow after the jump to hear their beef.
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Shop Talk: Philadelphia Weekly redesign with Keith McGinnis of Review Publishing

Update amended: 8:50 p.m. 4/19/09

From time to time in the recent past, one of the most trafficked Web sites in Philadelphia has gotten a major redesign.

Unfortunately, there was never one source that covered the whys and the hows. Now there is: Technically Philly.

So, here’s the first in an irregular series of our Shop Talk department, called The Redesign.

Both of Philadelphia’s big alternative-weeklies have changed their online looks in recent months. It just so happens that the one that came out last may have started first.

At the end December, CityPaper, founded in 1981 by Bruce Schimmel, went from this to this. And then, early last month, Philadelphia Weekly made its own jump from a cluttered display.

“We knew we needed to step up our platform online, not just re-skin the site,” says Keith McGinnis, the IT Web head over at Review Publishing, PW’s Samson Street-based parent company. “Now we have a platform that can help us rise to the occasion.”

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