If you are reading this, then you have probably read a few Medicine Hat Media articles and know what we are all about, but in taking a look behind the scenes, you can quickly come to realize that Medicine Hat Media is a fantastic resource for public awareness and promotion, and best of all, it is completely FREE.

Statistics:

• We are currently partnered with 16 other Medicine Hat-based websites, including the City of Medicine Hat website itself.
• We currently receive about 5500 unique viewers per month, which equates to about 10,000 page views per month.
• We currently have 8 writers or contributors who have wrote 306 posts in total, which have received 463 comments from 188 registered users.
• Aside from Google and directly going to MedicineHatMedia.com, most of our users come from following us on Twitter, which automatically updates with every new post we do. Our twitter currently has 288 followers. Some of our posts also show up around various places on Facebook and MySpace as well.

From these 4 facts, it is evident that Medicine Hat Media is the mecca of Medicine Hat-based advertising.

What you can achieve:

By writing and advertising on Medicine Hat Media, you can can achieve a more public awareness – completely free of charge – for any events you may be hosting or advertising, including bands, trade shows, art shows, new restaurants, and the list goes on…

The events that are advertised do not necessarily have to be in Medicine Hat. If there is a big event going on anywhere in southeastern Alberta, we love to create awareness of it.

What we will do for you:

If you are interested in becoming a writer for Medicine Hat Media, all you need to do is email us at info@medicinehatmedia.com and let us know that you want to get involved. We will then set you up with an account, and if need be, assist you with logging into the website and navigating through the back end to post your stories. Normally, if you are tech-savvy enough, you can do this all by yourself with no need for our approval before registering and logging into the back-end, both of which can be done here.

If you plan to be a regular contributor, you can also submit a biography and/or photo for yourself and we will add it to the About page.

Things to note:

Medicine Hat Media tries to maintain a level of professionalism in its articles. This is achieved by writing our articles with completely original content and attempting to maintain proper spelling and grammar. If we receive an article that needs editing, we will generally clean it up before posting.

Conclusion:

Advertising can be expensive, but with an ever-growing number of readers, your articles are guaranteed to be read by members of the Medicine Hat community, and best of all, it is completely free!

Contact us at info@medicinehatmedia.com with any questions or concerns

I could go on a long Facebook rant like I did a couple days ago about Twitter, but I’m pretty sure everybody knows what Facebook is, and most likely also know how they spend too much time on it. What you need to know is this: Facebook Connector has been implemented so that you can log in to Medicine Hat Media to comment through your Facebook login. What this means is that you can comment on the site and it will link back to your Facebook profile as well as take your current Facebook profile picture. This will only work if your privacy settings allow. For example, if you don’t have a public profile or public picture, they won’t be displayed – it doesn’t break any of your rules. You will also be able to do some other things like write status updates directly based on your comments or posts on the site. I’m sure I am missing other functions as well – I also seen a cool little Facebook overlay pop up on the site when I logged in via Facebook through Medicine Hat Media.

To log in using Facebook, click the “Facebook” login button above the comment submit section of every post. Normally though, it should log you in automatically if you are already logged into Facebook. Facebook and Medicine Hat Media now go together like bread and butter, and a hamburger between them, and maybe some BBQ sauce.

Originally started as a way to add some localized humour to the site, it has has ruffled a few too many feathers in a negative way for Medicine Hat Media on behalf of myself. While I did receive some nasty emails about it personally, I also got some “laugh-backs” as well, but unfortunately the people that liked the humour aspect will have to look elsewhere, more specifically, just add some locals on Twitter to get your fix. I’m definitely interested in any opinions on the matter, especially on the following aspect, please read on:

This is actually a perfect tie in to a rant I was saving. It’s apparent to me that a lot of people think Medicine Hat Media is some type of organization or start-up business model. I’ve got questions asked to me like, “How much do you make off the site?” or “Who pays you for this?” when in fact, we are a non-profit website, and most importantly, a blog. Maybe there’s hope for something more in the future though. We are not professional writers or journalists, although we try our best to do a good job – most of you probably have spotted a grammatical error, a typo, or maybe 100 of them if you have been a reader for awhile. It’s a huge responsibility for us (talking on behalf of Sean and I) to maintain and write for the site, both having a full time and a part time job each. Fortunately we have some dedicated contributors helping us spread the news of local events, which is the core function of the site; for that, we thank you kindly.

Back to the topic at hand: Can negativity actually exist on this site when describing a local business, restaurant or otherwise? In the past it has brought us many of emails complaining, and rightfully so. These comments and reviews could in fact hurt these businesses because people do read this site. Although Medicine Hat Media started with great ambition and freedom, the freedom is… well not so much anymore. Our negative comments and reviews are saved and talked about among friends rather than posted here. If you find us being negative about something, it’s usually about a large corporation or a single criticism on top of a plenitude of positives.

It’s almost contradictory in a way, we have become biased to help protect our community and local businesses. Maybe that’s not bad? But what happens when a business does a bad job? Shouldn’t it be in our best interest, or even Medicine Hat’s best interest to reveal that? I’m personally torn on the matter because I want to support local business as much as possible, but I’m a huge proponent of freedom of speech, especially on the web.

The most recent example being the vandalized signs as featured as part of “Friday Fail”. I could wager a guess that if I blurred out any business references from the sign, we wouldn’t of got nearly as much criticism, or any at all. In fact, it was okay when some very prominent members from the community posted it on Twitter, but because of my above comment, people hold a higher standard for this site, the onus is on us to deliver what they want. Like I said, I’m very interested in what people think on the matter, please comment and share your opinions. Hopefully you managed to read through this, if you don’t care to comment, at least vote on the poll below to let us know.

So if you are not a subscriber yet, or are subscribed to our old feed, update or add our new feed: Medicine Hat Media RSS Feed to whatever browser or reader you want – it should now work with everything.

Here’s a little information thus far, as of  July 26th, 2009 about Medicine Hat Media’s visitors, connections, general information, and statistics on and off the site since our launch in October, 2008.

• 172 posts
• 214 comments
• 114 registered users
• 15 submitted emails
• 32 members on the Facebook group
• 155 followers on Twitter
• 84 friends on MySpace

• 7 site partners
• 4 polls total
• 157 voters on our polls
• 176 votes cast
• 160 images uploaded
• 18,706 site visits
• Top three city visitors in order: Medicine Hat, Calgary, and Edmonton
• Google Pagerank of 4
• Alexa traffic rank of 1,238,967
• Most popular article: To the Gallows, Gregory Fritzke!
• Most searched keyword: “ashley van ham”
• Most popular visitor browser: Internet Explorer with 51% usage
• Most popular visitor operating system: Windows with 84% usage
• Most popular visitor screen resolution: 1024×768 with 25% usage
• Top traffic source not including search engines: Facebook

Sorry that this post was somewhat technical, but I think it will serve as a nice benchmark for us when we take a look back on it in a year or even two years time. Maybe we can do this every year? I doubt that anybody finds this kind of stuff interesting besides the people that work directly with the site, but who knows.

I might not be completely satisfied with the design of it, so it may change in the future depending on feedback. *Update* As of July 6th, I took the comments and feedback about it and changed it accordingly.

On a side note, this will free up some room for our “Partner” spot which has also recently been added to accomodate all of our partners. If you wish to be a sponsor or partner, please email us with a 90×90 graphic for your site and make sure to add us to your site. You will also now find Medicine Hat Media graphics on the bottom of the right sidebar as well as a press-kit PDF including a vector version of our logo.

We met up with Rob at The Medicine Hat College one afternoon and after setting up his equipment, he asked some questions and filmed Vaughn and I talking about Medicine Hat Media, and after a couple action shots of us typing away on our laptops and some post-interview production, the commercial was ready to air.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5j3agFTVjY

Being on TV was one of the sort of milestones that Vaughn and I both share. It is kind of akin to our presence on the Internet, because once you are on either, the possibility is there for an unlimited number of people to view your work. Also, I am not just so cool that I wore my sunglasses during the interview, but in actuality, I asked Rob if I should take them off, as it was sunny, and he said to leave them on.

The commercial airs every now and then on Shaw TV (Channel 10), but thankfully there is YouTube and you do not have to camp out to see it.

Shaw TV

Medicine Hat Media Shaw TV Interview Commercial

Also, for no reason at all, there’s an obligatory 80′s cartoon intro after the jump:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUEkc41bby8

The newest old Medicine Hat Media logo

Medicine Hat Media was first came into realization after many days of wondering what to name ourselves in an ongoing discussion between Sean and myself. We eventually settled on “Medicine Hat Media” – it just had a good ring to it, plus it fit our vision of what the site would be. Unknowingly for us, “Medicine Hat Media” was a a physical company before we snagged the .com domain in 2008.

Looking back, we actually already suspected that this domain was being used for some purpose before because we were getting link backs from other Medicine Hat sites that attributed us (or the Medicine Hat Media before us) to website design and development. Through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, I was able to take a look at what existed before in two entries:

November 20th, 2004
February 13th, 2005

From what we are able to see (from the portions of the site that still work) it was a graphic and web design company with a team made up of Mike Helton, James Robertson, and Niko Poulopoulos. Where they went or what they did after is a mystery! Judging from their earliest archived site, it seems like they might have been around longer than 2004 too, since they refer to that site as version 2.0. Comment if you have any stories or know anything else about the previous Medicine Hat Media.

We were just waiting for a large enough user base before making it, and now it is made, so get more fur than any turtle ever had, be more awesome than any biker mice on Mars, be more noble than a pharaoh when Egyptians ruled the world, quit the quack attacks, and join the group. Too many 1990′s cartoon references?

Join the Medicine Hat Media Facebook group here