The blog-centric website Nashville is Talking aggregates Nashville area blogs, bringing together many voices into one repository of Music City news and information.

The aggregator runs alongside a blog written by site editor Brittney Gilbert, a Nashville native and long-time blogger herself. WKRN-TV recruited Gilbert in the spring of 2005 to start up this station-sponsored blog as a way to increase advertising revenue and establish a Web presence, according to Gilbert.

“Not a lot of young people watch the news, and the station wanted to establish itself online in order to expose a different demographic to Web news,” Gilbert said. “This is a very different format from Web news you usually see.”

Gilbert explained that most of the blogs that appear on Nashville Is Talking are volunteered by the bloggers themselves. With full editorial control of the site, Gilbert reads through all the local blogs as they are updated throughout the day and highlights entries or postings she finds particularly noteworthy.

There are, for the most part, no restrictions on the blogs; any blog in the middle-Tennessee viewing area is fair game for the website. Gilbert said she has only rejected one blog due to its outwardly prejudiced nature.

“Occasionally I’ll link to a photo, a comic … something that doesn’t necessarily have to do with Nashville itself, but I try to keep the blog 90 percent generated by people in the community,” Gilbert said.

Writing and editing the blog is Gilbert’s full-time job, and she couldn’t be happier. She said it’s rare for someone to be hired just to write a blog.

“Prior to working here at the station, I was a waitress. I was publishing narrative non-fiction, which is how I was recruited to the site,” Gilbert explained. “I really enjoy [running this blog] and feel very lucky.”

The blog has received positive responses from the community, according to Gilbert, and the readership is increasing. Nashville is Talking has also helped WKRN-TV in some unexpected ways.

“We’ve gotten a lot of story ideas that have been handed off to reporters that we may not have gotten otherwise,” Gilbert said. “This is newsworthy stuff. It’s a great way to connect with the local audience.”

Chicago has a multitude of news media outlets that notify people of major crimes, but in a city this size, it’s unlikely that the media will report every single incident. That’s where Chicagocrime.org comes in.

“I thought the site would be a nice public service,” says Adrian Holovaty, a native Chicagoan with a background in journalism who developed the non-profit website.

Chicagocrime.org is designed to inform Chicago residents about recent crimes all over the city. It allows site viewers to search for crimes in specific crime locations, types, wards, zip codes and date ranges. Viewers can even create routes with the help of interactive city maps.

Through a process called screen scraping, the website downloads reported crimes once a day from Citizen ICAM, a site maintained by the Chicago Police Department. It then allows Internet users to browse through the crimes with Google Maps, creating an interactive and customized search process. Chicagocrime.org allows Chicago residents to learn about crimes occurring in their area that they may otherwise never hear about.

“I’m always working on projects, mostly little scripts that improve sites for personal use … Chicagocrime.org is this on a bigger scale.”

Holovaty says he does not include advertising on the site so that chicagocrime.org can continue to function as an intellectual service and that he plans to add more features to chicagocrime.org in the near future.

The next step for the site, according to Holovaty, is to integrate Chicago Transit Authority bus routes so that viewers can search for crimes along these routes.

“I plan to deduce the CTA route by looking at the location of the crime,” said Holovaty. He also intends to add a video map to make the site even more interactive. This will allow viewers to enter search parameters and watch the map play over a certain time period.

Chicagocrime.org recently won the grand prize in the Batten Awards for Innovations in Journalism. This $10,000 award is given by J-Lab, which looks for “novel approaches to journalism that spur non-traditional interactions and have an impact on a community,” according to J-Lab’s website.

“Thanks to the prize money, I can afford bigger and better servers [for the site] to add extra features that I have previously avoided,” said Holovaty. “I’m really excited.”

With all the success of chicagocrime.org, Holovaty has been contacted by other police departments with requests for websites for their departments and has started working with them as well. He is also currently working on a follow-up site to chicagocrime.org that will provide local data about Chicago — though he says he can’t reveal more details yet.

“[Chicagocrime.org] is just the first step in the Chicago media empire,” he said.