What’s next for INQUIRER.net?

AS expected, our site traffic shot up dramatically during the elections, but what’s remarkable is that even as the entire team worked hard and multi tasked to bring the news to our readers, our servers hardly broke a sweat.

This, even as our site was visited by at least 1.3 million people and generated 9.7 million page views in the week of May 14, as editor in chief JV Rufino recounted in this article.

How were we able to pull this off? Well, we can’t really tell you everything, right, heh, but one of the main reasons would be the new server architecture we adopted.

Here’s an excerpt from JV’s story:

Despite the heightened traffic, INQUIRER.net’s revised server architecture easily handled situation, according to Chief Operating Officer Robert Gantuangco.

“We’re capable of handling much higher levels of traffic and this surge didn’t even reach a quarter of our new server capacity,” he said.

For our 2007 election coverage, we also unveiled a new weapon to complement our Breaking News and running account (which we used to “liveblog” the elections). I’m talking about the Eleksyon 2007 Blog, which gave our readers the opportunity not only to post comments on the articles we’ve written, but also to create their own entries.

As the gaming and multimedia editor in charge of our blog network and other multimedia initiatives, I’m happy to see a mainstream media giant like INQUIRER.net adopting blogging as a tool for journalism. In the three months since we launched our first blog, which happens to be @play, I think we’ve come a long way in making you, our readers, a part of the news process. In fact, apart from Eleksyon 2007, we came out with Vox Populi to allow readers to share their views on any subject and post comments on articles from the different sections of INQUIRER.net.

Unlike other sites, we don’t believe in merely paying lip service to user-generated content just because it’s fashionable. And you’ll see even more efforts to empower our readers as we launch new projects in the near future.

So what can you expect from INQUIRER.net in the weeks and months to come? Well, without giving too much away, you’ll see even more proof that INQUIRER.net has gone beyond the news, beyond the printed word. We created a blog network for a reason, not because we just wanted to show it off and tell the world, hey, we have blogs, we’re cool, only to drop the ball and forget to update these sites.

What we hope to achieve — and what we seem to be doing, as we see our blog network generate more page views each week — is, on the one hand, to reach out to a new generation of readers. Internet users who may have been bored with mainstream media, but who are very much into blogs, podcasts, video sites and other online tools.

On the other hand, we are also exposing non-bloggers to the blogosphere, and showing our existing readers how blogging can enhance the way they experience the news on INQUIRER.net.

In fact, I’m proud to say that our business editor Salve Duplito was a non-blogger, yet she has embraced blogging and is now a certified blog addict, who maintains one of our most popular blogs, Money Smarts.

That’s the kind of convergence you’ll be seeing in terms of our efforts to make mainstream media work hand in hand with citizen journalism. In fact, you’ll see us launch the next wave of blogs, sooner than you think. We just had to wait until after the elections because, heck, we’re only human, heh

Another aspect of convergence, however, will involve the other companies under the Inquirer group of publications, of which we’re the online arm.

You’ve already seen examples of this growing convergence in our blog network, with Pam Pastor, chief of correspondents for Inquirer’s 2bU! and editor for Inquirer Super, joining Blog Addicts. Inquirer columnist Manuel Quezon III and Inquirer editor John Nery have launched the joint blog Current, while Inquirer columnist Ruben Nepales blogs for us via The Nepales Report.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to convergence.

Things are going to be even more exciting as we welcome the second half of 2007. We’ve completed the transition that saw the rebirth of INQUIRER.net and the formation of a new company, Inquirer Interactive Inc. Now it’s time to go full speed ahead. Heck, you didn’t think we’d be content not to fully utilize our new server architecture, did you?

Speaking of which, we’d like to know what you think of our recent direction, and what other services you’d like to see from INQUIRER.net. We owe our success to you, our readers, and we’re always here to listen to what you have to say.

After all, at the end of the day, you are also shaping the future of news.

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