Channel 2 wichita Blog · Wichita related Web stuff… and, continuing coverage of the 2 wichita Bookmarks Project
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Web feeds (a.k.a. “News Feeds” or “RSS Feeds”) have been a useful tool for time-conscious Web users for many years. They’re a great way to keep up with blogs, news sites, event calendars, job postings and other frequently updated content.

If you are new to RSS, here are a couple guides to help you get started.

• Feed 101 - From Feedburner/Google
• Explaining RSS to Your Mother - Video tutorials via abduzeedo

Localized Feeds

These feeds will help you keep up with what is going on Wichita.
(Right click link and “copy link location” to snag the feed URL.)
 

1. Twitter Local Feed  - Displays updates by Twitterers in and around Wichita. You can also check out our Twittchita page for a Web-based stream of Wichita tweets.
    
2. Twitter Search: Wichita - Shows current Twitter updates containing the word “Wichita.”
    
3. All WE blogs - Displays posts from all Wichita Eagle blogs. 
    
4. Kansas.com Feeds - The Eagle has headline feeds in most of their online sections (look for the orange RSS button at the top of the page). Save precious browsing time by making a “custom newspaper” in iGoogle or Netvibes.  In ten or fifteen minutes you can build a one page list of hundreds of regularly updating Eagle headlines to skim through effortlessly.
    
5. Craigslist Feeds - Subscribe to current listings in any category with the feed icon at the bottom of each page. Job Postings, Housing and For Sale/Wanted feeds can be especially useful. 
    
6. Eventful, Wichita Events - A local events calendar feed. Also, check out the events feed from Upcoming, not as many items as Eventful, but worthy of a spot in your newsreader.
    
7. 2 wichita Bookmarks Feed - Our feed of local news stories, blog posts, videos, photos and other local Web content scavenged by our contributors. You can also follow specific subject areas by subscribing to individual tag feeds. 
    

Know of any other feeds Wichitans might find useful?  Post them in comments.

We click on a lot of local links around here. We needed a page to hold all these links and organize them in an efficient manner. Our solution is the Web Map of Wichita.

So browse around, discover new sites, or just fave-it as a handy local link reference.

Future Enhancements: We are working on updates and new versions. Eventually, we will lose the image maps and go with a pure XML/SVG solution… possibly a flash version too. We are also working on a more accessible text-only version.

This is the first report from Wicsi, which ranks over 1000 sites in the Wichita-area Web orbit.

Don’t expect anything awe-inspiring on a list of the top ten Web sites in Wichita, Kansas. They are what they are, familiar, functional and fixed with deep roots in the traditional Internet.

Wichita’s Top 10

As compiled in the Wichita Web Site Index

1. Wichita Eagle
2. Wichita State University (dampened)
3. KAKE TV Channel 10
4. KWCH TV Channel 12
5. KSNW TV Channel 3
6. Sedgwick County
7. Warren Theaters
8. Wichita Public Library
9. Wichita Public Schools
10. City of Wichita

Two Behemoths

• WSU is by far the most visited site “in Wichita.” However, due to heavy national and international Web traffic and other user-patterns particular to university domains, we dampened their score to reflect “local interest.”
• No surprise to find Wichita’s big media outlets in the top five.  Old Media holds the high ground on the local Webscape. The Wichita Eagle site dominates the news/media genre with more daily visitors than the top three TV stations combined.

This short list ranks the top Web site genres found in Wicsi. We figure by adding the total average monthly unique visitors from all sites within its respective category. Where unique visitor data was not available we estimated by comparing similarly ranked sites.

1. News and Media
2. Education
3. Arts and Entertainment
4. Blogs
5. Restaurants and Bars

The News and Media genre has the fewest sites in our survey, but the strength of The Wichita Eagle easily pushes that category to the top of this list.

An argument can be made that blogs garner the most attention from Wichita Web surfers. While already a formidable local genre,  there are many newly-created blogs not in Wicsi yet. Not to mention the hundreds of smaller blogs we will never document. If you make the leap and put all user-generated content (MySpaces, Flickrs, Twitter pages etc.) in the blog category; they would grab the top spot on this list. For the purposes of our index, and this survey, we are sticking to a strict interpretation of blog.