Check out this iPhone app to locate real estate

At the Reynolds Journalism Institute Symposium at the University of Missouri, a nifty application called NearBuy won the student iPhone app competition:

The app uses your location to serve up either homes for sale in the area or apartments for rent. They bring in listings from Google Base, Craigslist and Oodle. You can then view info on listings on a map, including photos, property details, contact information. Plus, you can use Twitter to query people for opinions on particular places, and then rate the place. Extras include a rent calculator and a Flickr add-on that lets you see photos geo-coded nearby.

And even though it didn’t win, I really like the sound of The ADverse Network, which offers an enticing business platform for news outlets in need of innovative ways to work with advertisers (particularly local businesses):

They wanted to create a geo-located advertising service, so that you would get local ads based on your location. Ads are inserted into the two apps we developed, iCoMoNews and Vox. For the advertisers, there are tools like a live map that shows where people are accessing the network, and even more granular “heat maps” to show where people are viewing and clicking on ads. They say they got a clickthrough rate on ads of 3.8% which is pretty good.

One-stop shop for print ads

MediaShift takes a look at an online print marketplace called MediaBids, which empowers businesses looking to advertise:

While the exciting part might be the way they sell ads by auction, the real secret sauce for hyper-locals is that Mediabids is a one-stop shop for getting quotes and buying print ads. All the exchanges are through their website. Another plus is that if there’s a snag in the purchase process, you’ll have MediaBids on your side to walk you through it. It makes placing advertising so easy that any publication that wants to build a relationship with small local businesses has an easy online purchasing system already in place.

You better Represent

In January, I blogged about EveryBlock, which provides users with neighborhood-level news. Now comes an application from the New York Times designed for tracking local politics.

Represent allows citizens to follow their elected representatives:

If New Yorkers enter an address, they can see their political districts (Congressional, Assembly, Senate and City Council) and representatives. Represent will also track what their representatives have been doing through a recent activity feed from NYT articles and congressional votes.

Tips for online video

J.D. Lasica offers an informative post on how to create compelling online video (hint: follow your passion). Also included is a link to a series of related roundtable discussions on subjects like distributing video, monetizing your work and how to measure success.

The power of the printing press

In the race to find an online business model that works, are newspaper companies ignoring their own, most obvious strength? Michael Josefowicz, writing for MediaShift, thinks so:

In all the noise about the web, newspapers have overlooked their defensible advantage. They have the intelligence and machinery to print and distribute information faster, cheaper and more accurately than anyone else. Instead of focusing on that strength, most of the current discussion is about how they have to get into a new business in which they have no natural advantage.

The way to better SEO

At MediaShift, Mark Glaser offers nine tips for improving search engine optimization, or SEO. One of the commenters also provides some useful information with regard to headlines that aren’t SEO-friendly:

There is a place for creative witty headlines – in the anchor text of your promo links, which will appear both on your site and hopefully on blogs and social discovery sites like digg and reddit. This is where that skill can make a huge difference by enticing the reader to explore further.

Keep content fresh, but don’t forget your readers

At MediaShift, Roland Legrand offers seven ways that news sites can engage in low-cost content creation, including link journalism, publishing works in progress on blogs (a practice that I’ve been a fan of for the past four years) and user-generated content (if the quality’s there to attract readers).

But when he advocates throwing raw source files online, I’m not so sure: