In the next phase of building a user-generated content environment, I launched a new version of ShareOC.com last week.

ShareOC is built using Posterous and I feed content to the site manually by email and directly uploading on the web (for Flickr posts). So far, the website has 78 posts for 2011 shared by more than 20 people on topics including sunrises, Praying Mantis, flooding and Jacaranda trees.

The Posterous temporary solution gives us a free web tool for aggregating all user submissions and it makes it easy for staff to see and download content for use in our products.

Mobile is becoming more a part of what the collective newsroom does every day.

When the OCRegister mobile app launched in April 2010, there was very little people could do but use the app and offer feedback. Today, an alerts system built into our online CMS allows more people to meet the needs of our growing mobile audience.

So far, the OCRegister offers 24 streams of news alerts on a variety of topics including breaking news, fast food, the Anaheim Ducks, wildfires and Huntington Beach.

I compile the information for monthly mobile reports sent to newsroom staff, as well as marketing and advertising employees. The mobile share shows the shift of some segment of our audiences (or attraction of new audiences) to mobile products.

2010 mobile share of all digital traffic:

2.74%    January
3.67%    February
4.08%    March
3.45%    April
4.50%    May
7.64%    June
8.27%    July
9.22%    August
7.59%    September
9.55%    October
10.49%    November

I worked with the Register’s key web and mobile designer, Rick Ho, to create unified branding across the Register’s social media accounts. The first step is the Register’s Facebook pages.

I worked closely with the marketing and advertising departments, OCRegister social media users and our social audiences to use the same branding base for our mobile products and social accounts.

Our mobile group with a few new people added got to work on figuring out our approach for tablets.

Months later, the strategy and funding were approved by management.

Now the fine design details, specific content plans and workflow changes are now being decided based on the strategy our small tablet team (the small working group included myself and three others).

The key to our tablet strategy is that tablets are a true hybrid medium. At the present moment, tablets represent a perfect blend between online and offline, tactile and digital, involved and lean-back, mobile and desktop. Stay tuned on the latest tablet products to emerge based on this strategy.

The tool is built in the newsroom’s online content management system and it lets users send a breaking news alert to audiences on Twitter, on Facebook, via text message and (ultimately) via push notification.

Before this tool was created, editors would use multiple websites and processes to send an alert – such as that a wildfire had broken out in the forest. The tool auto populates with the best information (pulled from the story and headline) in the best format for each medium. A central bit.ly account lets the Register measure how many people click on each attached link. The new tool’s faster workflow implications also lets us created more niche text message streams for our audiences.

I took the lead on building a new OCRegister mobile website soon after the Freedom mobile project was approved.

The first version of our mobile site had these goals: be built by the Freedom IT department (rather than hosted and developed by a third-party), include multiple photos when included with stories, and add full metric tracking so we can learn how people use the site.

The new site may not be flashy, but it has solved numerous problems we experienced with the third-party mobile site and having access to full metrics has been invaluable as mobile traffic grows.

The newsroom’s first large transition during my time was from print-only to web-first. The newsroom’s new movement is to be audience-focused evenly across multiple channels.

The image at left shows the workflow steps for every journalist in delivering to our many audiences (print, web, mobile and social).

Sharing information among media companies is a great way to learn from and inspire others in how to build great experiences for mobile audiences.