Contacting us this week

Buffalo.com photo by Jeff Noto.

Beginning tomorrow, Deanna and I are going to be at The Erie County Fair. A lot. I pretty much plan to live there for large portions of the next two weeks.

If you need to get a hold of us, use these telephone numbers:

Ben: 244-2557
Deanna: 390-2652

You can email us, but I am not sure how regularly we will check our messages - I mean, we will answer them daily, but maybe not with the speed with which we answer them now. So calling is recommended for more pressing issues.

Hope to see some of you out there!

Branching out

Buffalo.com photo by Don Nieman.

Right now, we are recruiting college students to serve as campus interns - on-the-scene reporters and photographers who will essentially cover the doings at their schools. We want to attract a college-aged audience, and figure this is one way to get them - by offering something that they aren't necessarily getting anywhere else.

We also are not actively recruiting new community contributors. We want to retain and continue working with the people who are in the program, but we're not advertising for new people at the moment. We are pleased with you - the current group - and want to keep you all active, motivated, and involved in the MyBuffalo experience.

You have probably noticed that we're doing more stuff like video and podcasts. I want you to know that you - our talented contributors - are absolutely welcome to get involved in the action. If you have an idea for a podcast, or a video series, or anything along those lines, just talk to me or Deanna - we would love to take a good idea and turn it into a series at the MyBuffalo site. If you have a particular interest, or have always felt like you could host your own show, or simply want to try something new, we are here to help make that a reality.

Writers, you can try your hand at photography.

Photographers, you can try writing stories (as Darleen successfully did yesterday - nice job, Dar).

Anyone can record and post their own podcast. Anyone can pitch an idea for a video series. We will help with the technical end if we think it's feasible.

This is my invitation to you to consider branching out. We have this neat little toy called MyBuffalo...feel free to use it to it's full capacity.

On posting descriptions with your photos, bulk uploading, and more

Hey photographers:

I originally wrote this in an email, and decided maybe it was something we all could enjoy...

When you post your MyBuffalo photos, you will see that there is a "Description" box where you can post a write-up. It doesn't have to win the Pulitzer! Just three or four sentences about the event - where it was, what it was about, maybe an amusing anecdote. No need to worry too much about it!

It will be a lot easier when the bulk uploader is done - and again, I'm expecting that literally any hour now. It's finished, in theory, but still needs some finishing touches.

As far as finding specific events - if the event was relatively recent, people will be able to go into the "Recent Photos" section and find them, but I think this is where tagging will be really key. You are able to be really specific with your tags in MyBuffalo, which was not the case in Spotted. My advice is to post as many tags as possible whenever you add your photos, because this will increase the power of the search tool.

Bylines for writers

There has been a little confusion regarding the difference between articles and blogs at MyBuffalo.

Here is the delineation:

• Blog: anyone can post a blog. You can blog. I can blog. Joe in Accounting can blog. In fact, I wish he would blog. That guy knows some dirt.
  
  
• Article: although they are written in the blog format, an article is actually a Buffalo.com-contributed piece. Deanna and I have access to administrative tags that allow us to mark certain blogs as "articles." This allows us to push content into the Articles section.

In the very near future, we will have a special interface for the Buffalo.com contributors that will allow you to directly post articles to the Articles section. This interface will also allow our photographers to bulk-upload photos. It's coming very soon! I was actually messing with some of the behind-the-scenes tools on this particular piece yesterday.

One more note for writers:

When you post an article, you obviously will no longer have the whole "Buffalo.com/YourHub John Doe" title anymore...so we need you to add a byline. At the top of each article you post, you should have a heading that looks like this:

John Doe
Buffalo.com Contributor

If you have any questions, please let me know!

Some more news and info on the site changeover

Buffalo.com photo by Erica Morano.

Because we will be changing over from Spotted and YourHub to the new MyBuffalo.com site on Monday, please keep the following issues in mind as you post content to our sites this week:

• If you post any content, please hold onto your original copies.
  
  We will automatically upload all content from the Spotted and YourHub sites through May 31 to MyBuffalo.com , but photos and stories from this week will not be automatically loaded.
  
  Please load (or re-load) your content from this week onto MyBuffalo.com on Monday, June 8 - it will be a great way to get a hang of the new site.
  
  
  
• Please stop distributing Spotted and YourHub cards - we don't want to send people to sites that will no longer exist in five days. I will have MyBuffalo cards for you in the very near future...when they come in, I will either mail them out to you or arrange a way to get them to you.
  
  
• If you have a Spotted and YourHub ID card - let me know and I will get you a Buffalo.com ID, instead.
  
  
• If you have any questions for me, please let me know!
  

I know this is a somewhat hectic and confusing time for our contributor program, but things should settle down after we get the new MyBuffalo site launched...and thank you for your patience.

The cards....

This probably goes without saying, but please stop using the Spotted and/or YourHub cards after this weekend at events...we'll have new cards on the way. I will mail them out once they arrive.

Today at noon: Ahmad Rashad, live on Buffalo.com

If you can be in front of a computer today at noon, check out Buffalo.com - Deanna is going to have Ahmad Rashad (yes, that Ahmad Rashad) as her guest in the weekly IMportant People live chat. He's going to host the Buffalo Fan Awards on Thursday, May 21, and he's going to talk about the event and all sorts of other good stuff during the hour-long online conversation.

All you need to do is go to Buffalo.com at noon and check out the IMportant People box - it's located below the Featured Photos - and you can either read along or send in your questions, comments, and opinions to the former Buffalo Bill and celebrity TV sports personality.

If you read this after the live chat - for shame, by the way - then you can check out the archived version on the IMportant People page.

Please check it out! This is a really big deal for Buffalo.com - we're pretty excited.

Don't get scammed!

Buffalo.com photo by Bill Parker.

Bad news...I received this email from one of the members of our internship program today. It's a good reminder that you need to be careful dealing with buyers and sellers online...

I just wanted to send a word of warning to anybody who is selling any higher end electronics on Craigslist.com I posted my Canon 40D and Canon lens package on Craigs list for $850.

I was contacted by a gentleman who asked if I would mind shipping the item to his son overseas. I of course said no. I would just need $ for postage. He said he would include $150 to ship and package it as a gift. When I accepted the offer he asked for my PayPal account address. Then when I gave him my address a few hours later I received two e-mails. One is the one below and the other one giving me the ship to address in Nigeria and complete financial details of the transaction. However it had a notification that payment would be held until a confirmation was received that the item had been shipped and a tracking number was received. That was to protect their client from being scammed. I checked my PayPal account and to my dismay there was no $ in it. I called PayPal and they confirmed my intuition – the whole thing was a scam. She said that many people without much experience selling etc with PayPal often ship and then receive no $. She asked if the country was Nigeria and when I confirmed she said that was a well known scam on Craigs list.

Needless to say I still have my Canon 40D and 18-55mm Canon lens for sale for $850 so if you know anybody looking for one let me know.

And if someone is interested in buying that camera, let me (Ben) know and I'll put you in touch with the intern who wrote this.

The Value of Interning, Part I

Buffalo.com photo by Chris Brown.

Deanna found this article and thought it might be interesting to you...here's a good excerpt:

If you can afford it, intern, even it isn’t paid (most aren’t anyways). This shows dedication, not to mention you are gaining experience and getting valuable additions for your resume while your searching for a job as well as expanding your network and contacts. Eventually, this economy will turn around and if you are sticking it out with a company, when they start to grow and expand again, you’re already versed with their operations, structure and culture. They would certainly prefer to hire someone who already “knows the ropes.”

A featured photo note

If you go to the Buffalo.com home page, you will notice that we feature 10 Spotted photos every day (or nine photos and one video, depending on how much new video content is floating around).

The tool we use to upload those photos favors horizontal photos: that is to say, "wider" shots.














Buffalo.com photo by Matt and Angela Brown.

Lately, a growing trend among our Spotted photographers has been to post vertically aligned photos.



















Buffalo.com photo by Dan Ruggiero.

This is not a problem on the actual Spotted site - we can crop and feature the photos on the Spotted home page using admin tools in the Spotted software. This is not the case in the Buffalo.com module (unfortunately).

Please make an attempt to post a decent number of horizontal photos with your galleries - photos and galleries featured on Buffalo.com get a lot more traffic than those that are not...and if we can't find any worthy horizontal photos in your gallery, we can't feature your photos on the home page, even if your vertical shots are fantastic.

Just something to keep in mind.