Today's Bloggers Briefing at the Heritage Foundation featured two great guests: Congressman Pete Olson (R-TX) and John Solomon of the Washington Times.

Rep. Olson spoke first, and addressed the health care bill being considered by Congress. He said that there are three things people are upset about regarding this bill: the tax increase, long-term budget implications, and the public option. People understand that the public option will mean a government bureaucrat interfering in medical matters. And while there is some hope for conservatives regarding the health care bill, Rep. Olson said the GOP will not underestimate Speaker Pelosi – she is committed to passing the bill.

The Congressman also spoke about media bias against conservatives. He said it is a fact that the mainstream media does not treat Republicans fairly, and emphasized the need for conservatives to utilize blogs to get out their message.

Read more about Rep. Olson’s comments at today’s briefing in The Hill.

After Rep. Olson, John Solomon of the Washington Times spoke.

Solomon described the Washington Times as “platform agnostic,” meaning the news agency strives to be on every platform available - video, TV, the Internet, you name it. As of now, the news agency has 52 channels to get its news out to the public, and is constantly working on more (including an iPhone application.)

This strategy seems to be working. The Washington Times web site has seen a 500% growth in its visitors in just 1 year, and is now the 12th largest newspaper in the country, reaching 890 million people in 2009. This growth may also have something to do with the Washington Times' investigative reporting as the newspaper is constantly breaking important stories. On that note, Solomon advised us to check out the front page of the Washington Times tomorrow for a big story they will be running.

Solomon also spoke about a new project – TheConservatives.com – which he described as the "Google of conservative thought" and a “meritocracy of ideas.”

TheConservatives.com has enormous capabilities, including giving grassroots conservatives the ability to engage with major conservative leaders like Fred Thompson, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist and Liz Cheney. It can also be used to activate grassroots campaigns, test messaging points, and introduce new ideas and get them out quickly. Solomon said the purpose of TheConservatives.com is to marry leadership with the grassroots, and provide a platform for the grassroots to bubble up to the top, versus the traditional top-down approach.

Importantly, TheConservatives.com monitors in real time, without any polling, what people are talking about. It also monitors what conservative leaders are talking about. Solomon said that former Governor Sarah Palin’s staff use TheConservatives.com to watch what she says on Twitter and Facebook.

Bottom line: be sure to check out TheConservatives.com. You can also follow @WTconservatives on Twitter.

At the conservative bloggers briefing hosted by Robert Bluey of the Heritage Foundation, Washington Times editor John Solomon, who was sporting a retro Apple iBook G4, joined us to preview the re-launch of the new, modern, and social Washington Times.

[The DNS started switching over to the new platform at 12:01 PM EST, so if you're seeing the older version, click here: http://38.118.71.92/]

(For background on Solomon, check out this WaPo piece. Of note, I couldn't find a Wikipedia entry -- need to work on that.)

"If you build it; if you create a live and dynamic website, your users will return again and again," Solomon said walking us through the site. Indeed. Nothing new for the TechRepublican community but groundbreaking for a major daily newspaper.

Smarter, More Effective Distribution Model:
* Horizontal and narrow approach to distributing news. What this means is providing readers several "news themes" or "tags" as we know them that users/readers can track through RSS and other feeds. In other words, if I only care about what is being written in the "paper" on "technology," I can do so. At least that's what I'm hoping. That's really, really smart.

Blending Print Edition with Online Edition:
* Adding the news "themes" described above to the print edition alerting print-edition readers to the new feature at WashingtonTimes.com. I like it. As print users toss their fishwrapper in the trash and start accessing content in real-time, this should make a big difference.

Blog Baby Blog:
* The blogs will be busy, real busy and lots of them (including citizen-led blogs). Solomon expects at least 100 postings per day in the many different blogs. The old, old blog, ironically sometimes called "FishWrapper" was abysmal. It was segmented to some odd sub-URL, e.g., video1.washingtontimes.com and it was only most-recently updated with serious content. As a hat-tip to the Washington Times' willingness to make its blog better, it had already started elevating some of its most veteran, well-connected reporters, like Stephen Dinan, to be full-time bloggers. Smart move and Dinan's blog is now a daily destination for me. I expect I'll add a few more daily destinations.

Video Rules, Duh:
Eight original videos will be rolling out of the newsroom daily with syndicated content from the Associated Press (and perhaps the vlogging community) helping complement its video content. As you might expect, the video player is shareable via embed code and social links. Look out television news, we're no longer watching, we're watching embedded players on our favorite news outlets.

Twitter, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Oh My!:
And they thought it was a fad. On every single page, they've included links to their communities in several of the communities that we spend most of our time. This is smart. Not groundbreaking as it's now pretty much the norm, but good to see and a step in the right direction.

SEO Is A Good Thing:
Three layers of taxonomy added to the website to yield better search engine traffic. Taxonomy means category tags. Two layers are created by inform.com and the other by the Associated Press. I noticed this first recognizing that they switched to a re-write of entry-based URLs to a date and title-based format (which search engine robots and spiders can read). Example:

Previous:
http://washingtontimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080527/NATION/790731607/1001

Modern (Note: 38.188.71.92 will be replaced with washingtontimes.com):
http://38.118.71.92/news/2008/may/27/candidates-vow-to-help-veterans/

Given that the new website is extremely "rich" in content, one question I asked of Solomon was whether he was concerned about the low access to broadband access throughout the nation (primarily in rural America). Of note, this number is extremely high, somewhere between 50% and 30% of America.

He noted the gap in rural America and pointed out that the mobile version of the website provides headlines and a lighter version of the site. He said that at some point you have to take advantage of the fact that 3/4 of Americans have a high-speed Internet connection and use all of the tools in your toolbox to get your news out. The front-page is 700-800 KB (extremely low by news standards and given the flash-based content). Solomon expects it to go up to as much as 900 KB. He said the sweet spot for a news hub these days is between 600KB - 1 MB.

Given the amount of video content, I asked whether Solomon thought they could penetrate the declining "TV" audience. He said absolutely, the point is to distribute news through every medium available.

CONCLUSION:
This website is another bold step for the Revolution. What started among citizens, bloggers, and others empowered by the Internet has now started migrating to the news rooms. I expect this trend to continue and soon even our local (daily, weekly) newspapers will provide hubs for us to better connect with it. Both as a citizen and a consultant who works to help get a clients message out, that's a good thing.