We currently offer one product: Bakomatic (pronounced bake-oh-matic), which is what powers all of our niche community Web sites as well as the registration and user profiles on Bakersfield.com. In the future we plan to also offer universal registration and an audience-focused, self-serve advertising component.

Bakomatic Overview: Core Platform

Bakomatic's powerful featureset is what allows us to easily and inexpensively serve many niche audiences. Here are just a few key aspects:

Reskinnable and Redeployable

Our platform can be easily skinned to make very different looking sites with a number of configurations. Each site can have its own unique look and feel, all while serving the specific needs of the audience you are trying to reach. In our experience, once you have the design elements created to spec, it takes only 1-2 days to deploy, test and launch a new site.

One Platform Powers Multiple Types of Sites

You can use Bakomatic to create a number of different types of sites, including:

Moderation or Freeform Posting

Sites can be un-moderated, where posts immediately publish to the live site, or moderated, where a site manager reviews posts prior to publication. You can also mix moderation and freeform postings in the same site by configuring categories. You select the option that works best for your company's needs.

Powerful Editor

Bakomatic has a powerful and easy to use editor that lets anyone -- from a 40-year-old school secretary to a band member -- create compelling content. Anyone who can compose an e-mail can post content on a Bakomatic site.

The editor lets users add rich text, including fonts and colors. They can also add photos, audio or documents with anything they post. And when users post audio to a blog, the RSS feed is automatically turned into a Podcast that others can subscribe to through iTunes or any other Podcasting program!

For consistency, we use the same editing tool for posting articles, listings, events, blog entries, discussions and comments, and parts of profiles. However, depending on the type of content you're creating, different fields appear and disappear based on context.

The Admin and Editor of a site can edit any user's post, and users can always edit their own content and delete comments posted on their content.



Community Content Management

"Citizen journalism" requires some tasks and workflow that are unique to community-contributed content.

We have learned that when members of a community contribute content to be printed and delivered to the doorsteps of their neighbors, they take their contributions very seriously and expect the editors to do the same. The relationship between the editor and the community contributors is just as important as that between editor and reporter, and perhaps even more important and challenging to manage. It's vital that you have tools that make this a simple and positive experience for everyone.

Our content manager was created in 2004 specifically for this purpose for Northwestvoice.com, which was the first "citizen journalism" product created by a U.S. newspaper. Now this revolutionary tool is available for use by others.


The community content manager makes it easy for an editor to do the following:

  • See the latest contributed stories in one glance. By default any story contributed to a citizen journalism site is accessible only to the editor, who must review it quickly to ensure legality (and also check grammar and remove typos, a task we have been surprised to learn our community members expect us to do for them -- showing that some things in journalism never change!)

  • Flag content as approved or unapproved and follow up with the contributor.

  • Assign select stories to a print edition. Later, when it's time to lay out a print edition, editors can use the same tool to bring up a list of stories tagged for that edition.

  • Copy content from the content manager into any print layout program.

  • Feature content on the home page, and write a headline and subhead for the home page that is different from what the user submitted.

Permissions and User Management

By default every new registered user has access to only their own content, but you can upgrade any user to Editor status, which gives them more tools to help you manage the community. An Editor can be a staff member, or a trusted community member.

You can also disable a user's blog at any time, and suspend a user, which locks them out of the system and makes their profile invisible to others.

Optional User Profile and Blogs for Every User

Our user profiles allow an individual to be as open, or private, about their data as they choose. With sections like "About Me", "Interests" and "Friends" (social networking), users can explore a variety of ways to connect with other site users.

A more reserved person's profile may be as simple as this, while someone who enjoys all of the options we have to offer may have a profile that looks like this. Once a user has a profile, it's easy for other community members to sign their guestbooks, request to be friends or respond to friend requests from other users of your site.

One of the most exciting new features is the ability to give a blog to every registered user on your site. The blog lets them add text, photos, MP3s or documents to each post, and they can even re-attach files they uploaded previously without having to find and upload them again.

Every blog also has its own RSS 2.0 feed -- a great way to get users to promote you by promoting themselves. We surface the latest "Add to My ..." buttons for various services, including Add to My Yahoo, Add to Google and Add to My AOL. This is a great way to get your users who also use Web portals (which is most of them) to get back to your site, and also give their friends a way to do the same.

Because we know privacy is of growing important to people, we also allow any user to make their profile completely private and hidden to search. For any site, you can also decide if profiles are private or public by default.

Special Profiles With Radio for Bands

Local bands can also have a band profile where they can upload MP3s of their music,
and an embedded radio player allows you to give local bands the exposure they dream of, while providing your audience with music they can't find anywhere else.

Integrated Events Calendar

The events calendar allows any user to submit an event to your site, including date, time, pricing, location, contact information and photos to set your user's events apart from those found on other sites.

If you install more than one site on the same server, as we do, you can also set events (or any type of content) to be visible in the calendars of other sites. You can mix and match events across sites, and also prevent events from being shared across sites.

For example, in our setup we allow any event posted on Bakotopia to appear in the Masbakersfield calendar, and vice-versa. However, events from Bakotopia never appear on the more "family friendly" brands like Northwest Voice, Southwest Voice and Newtobakersfield.

Discussions

The Discussion areas of our platform have been host to some truly lively thought exchanges on a number of topics. Whether you want to ask about holiday plans or social and political issues, the Discussion boards provide a great way to engage your site users.


Interests, Blog Topics and Other User "Tags"

When users update their profiles or post new blog entries, they can add optional "tags" that describe their hobbies and interests, or the topic of their blog posts. You can see users sharing their interests on Bakersfield.com and Bakotopia.

Tagging offers a great way for you to stay on top of emerging trends (for example, 10 years ago you could have used tags to know before anyone else that Pokemon was catching on with kids). In the future we will also be tying advertising to user tags.


Custom Metrics

Our custom metrics system gives you granular information about what your users are doing on your sites.

A simple interface lets you queue up reports that show activity grouped by age, zip code, type of activity and more. The metrics can also be applied for other sites that are not on Bakomatic, but which use its registration system.

For a real-life example, on any given day we can see a graph showing the age or location of every person who viewed a story on Bakersfield.com (see left).


 

Configurable Category Taxonomy

You can log in to create new categories at any time, and change their relationship to each other in your taxonomy. You can also decide which categories you want to display on your home page, which is one way to drive people into specific categories that are working while de-emphasizing those that aren't.

 

Extensible Registration System

Our registration system can also be used on sites that are not powered by Bakomatic. For example, Bakersfield.com news stories are on another Web server that we don't control. By adding simple Javascript to story templates, any user who tries to view a story is sent to the Bakomatic registration server, and after registering or signing in is returned to that story. Registration status is saved in a persistent cookie so that users don't need to sign in again to view stories, but they are asked to signed in again to edit their profiles or do anything that gives them access to their private data.

Kids' Safety and COPPA (Children's Online Privacy Protection Act)

Many social networking sites are now struggling with children's safety issues. We got ahead of that on Bakomatic by building in support for COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy and Protection Act. Any user whose birthdate indicates that they are under 13 is blocked from having a user profile. This extends to all aspects of user profiles, including social networking. While it's impossible to prevent children from lying about their age, the Bakomatic product does at least provide the level of protection mandated by the Federal government.

Modules Sold Separately

Bakomatic also offers a growing number of modules that serve specific purposes. These modules can be purchased separately, but require the core Bakomatic platform to work properly. Available modules include:

Inside Guide Business Directory

An interactive directory of local businesses that allows users to submit ratings and reviews. Note that the directory does not come populated with local business data -- you must acquire that information yourself and import it into the system, using a provided business impot tool.

Print Classified Import and Display

Imports exported feeds from the DTI classified system and displays online. Integrated with Bakomatic search. Also allows you to associate tags with ads to cause related content to appear in the right rail.

Enhanced Online-only Classifieds With E-Commerce Integration

This tool allows users to post multimedia online-only ads (fully self-serve) and pay for them with credit cards via the Paypal Payflo Pro gateway. Users can post rich text, photos andYouTube videos. They can enhance their ads with keywords that cause ads to appear in a special Classifieds tagspace, borders and Top Ad placements. They can choose whether or not to associate ads with their user profiles so that recently posted ads appear next to their blog postings and other submissions, and their profiles appear on the ad itself. Users can also choose to allow public commenting on ads. Pricing is fully configurable by category, with a la carte prices for each upsell as well as package prices.

"AutoSnap" Photo Gallery Tools

Lets every user post photo galleries that are placed on their user profiles, as well as in a large-format Flash player. Comes with a configurable category manager for photo galleries and integration with the embedded "bako:gallery" photo slideshow.