Boston.com to use Pluck’s SiteLife platform for social media

The Boston Globe’s Web site, Boston.com, has chosen the SiteLife platform from Pluck for its online social media interactions.

Boston.com will also use the platform for its 10 hyperlocal sites, organized under the Your Town label. Boston.com’s Your Town sites provide user-generated and aggregated local content in each of the following Massachusetts communities: Hingham, Malden, Medford, Melrose, Norwell, Scituate, Newton, Needham, Waltham and Wellesley.

Robert Kempf, Boston.com’s vice president of product, said in a statement that Pluck’s social networking platform helps create a “thriving online community” and combines content such as text and photographs from both Boston.com’s editorial content and from original user contributions.

SiteLife is a social media platform that allows for chat boxes, blogs, forums, comment posting, photos and videos. By using different SiteLife products, organizations can choose different features for their Web sites that promote user involvement and interaction. A SiteLife comment box, for example, would allow a news Web site to concentrate on its original content while the SiteLife feature would take care of the technical details and visual presentation needed for the comment box.

Pluck is based in Austin, Texas.

Boston launches online site to show crimes and their locations

The Boston Police Department is partnering with Salt Lake City-based CrimeReports.com to provide an online source for crime information in Boston.

The Police Department began in mid-June to post crime data nightly on the site, which uses Google maps to show crimes reported according to location, with general descriptions such as “theft” or “assault.” Residents can then check local crime by logging on to crimereports.com and typing in a local address.

Boston Police Commissioner Edward Davis told the Boston Herald that, aside from emergencies, most calls the department gets are from people who want to know the crime levels around their homes or work areas.

CrimeReports,is already used by 520 police departments in the United States.

Boston.com’s Big Picture draws attention with Iran photos

Boston.com’s The Big Picture blog received 750,000 hits within the first 24 hours of its June 15 posting of photographs of election-related demonstrations and riots in Iran, Alan Taylor, editor of the Big Picture, told Photo District News.

Besides receiving attention from several prominent current affairs blogs, the Big Picture blog generated 1,500 comments in the first day of the posting of the Iran photos – the fastest a Big Picture post has ever accumulated that many comments, Taylor said.

The items above were written, at least in part, from published reports by Jen Slothower, a graduate student at the Northeastern University School of Journalism and a news staff coordinator for the Bulletin.