Orange County Register

True story: I once owned a pair of cheesy “blue blocker” sunglasses (resembling the ones pictured at left) that I had purchased at the top of the Stratosphere in Las Vegas. I bought them for about $10 in a gift shop and they were laughably unfashionable, which is partly why I bought them. I also needed something as I prepared to go out onto their sunny outdoor observation deck. Once I boarded the rooftop free-fall roller coaster (a la Supreme Scream at Knott’s Berry Farm or Twilight Zone Tower of Terror at Disney’s California Adventure), I really didn’t care if the glasses offered complete UVA and UVB protection.

Some five years later, in the spring of this year, those sunglasses mysteriously disappeared. I last saw them in my car, which makes me wonder if someone couldn’t resist and had to loot them out of my ride (maybe it was my wife trying to do me a favor).

If in fact such a horrendous crime against humanity had been committed and reported to my neighborhood Sheriff’s department, it would now show up on a new crime map within the community pages of the OCRegister.com beta site. I can now literally look at the street where I park my car and see if a crime has been committed there in the past 24 hours - and it’s updated every 5 minutes.

It’s one of several examples of how we’re upgrading our local coverage to “hyperlocal.” So what does that mean, exactly?

Quite simply, it means we’re transitioning from being content creators to content curators. If we’re not covering the story or producing the information, we’re teaming with those who are and hosting the information on our new community pages.

You’ll find local traffic maps, school ratings, business directories, events, discussion forums, Flickr photo groups and plenty of other cool stuff.

The new community pages are organized in regional clusters, and accessed within the LOCAL NEWS content box on the OCRegister.com beta site. By the way, you can fully customize this box on the beta site so it displays information about cities that interest you by clicking the EDIT icon along the top right of the content section.

Earlier this year, we tested hyperlocal features on our new community pages in the cities that encompass the Saddleback Valley: Laguna Hills, Mission Viejo and Lake Forest. Readers dug it, and views to those city pages nearly doubled. So we decided to build about a dozen more just like it across the county!

As you can tell from my recent blog posts, we’re in full-scale reinvention and expansion mode on OCRegister.com.

One could say our online future is so bright, we’ve gotta wear shades (as long as it’s not the blue blockers pictured above)!

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