Best front page news video ever?!

… Well, it’s up there, at least.

Al.Com Features the Zelda Overworld Theme.

Hah, I’m such a nerd.

Anyway, since I’m here I might as well review a somewhat local news website, Al.com. This site hosts The Birmingham News, The Huntsville Times and the Mobile Press-Register. Combined, these three papers are the largest in the state, and cover a geographic area running from the Tennessee/Alabama border in the north, to the Gulf Coast in the south.

Through the years, I have seen this site grow from a somewhat questionable, plain white page website linking to the three separate papers with a hideous border that reminded one more of golf than news, to a content-laden site choc-full of local news and entertainment goodness.

Al.com is the definition of interactivity and the news. The site encourages people to sign up and submit their own photos, videos, news stories and blogs. This interactivity is so popular that it has its own “interact” section on the navigation bar, which takes the user to a page consisting entirely of user-generated content.

Also featured is an active forum in which users can discuss news, and the ability to comment on officially posted news stories. And people do take advantage of the comment feature, quite frequently, on controversial stories. It’s almost more entertaining to read the comments on a story, than the actual news story itself. It brings a whole new level of community involvement into local issues and politics.

Some plainer features of interactivity that the site features are RSS feeds, Twitter updates, video sharing and an interactive Facebook page. Also, a new feature allows users who sign up for the site to tailor the page to mirror their local news, instead of receiving all three newspaper feeds at once.

Al.com is also timely. News is updated throughout the day by the minute, and there is a constantly updating box that shows only the most recent news, along with when it was posted, regardless of the news content. Each article links back to the paper that the story originated from and the author of the story. Each contributor to the newspapers has his or her own webpage that states who they are, what they do, and who they work for.

In addition to news, the site features one of the largest classifieds in the state, as well as one of the largest job search engines in the state. The ads are from all three of the newspapers that are hosted on the site. Also, there are sections for real estate, automobiles, and a shopping locator for local businesses. I wonder how much the site makes from such listings, and whether or not locally placed classifieds automatically wind up on the website.

Anyway, there is just too much content on this site to sum it up in one quick review. It has all of the usual suspects that a regular print newspaper, and then some. The fact that it hosts not only one, but three newspapers turns it into a giant pile of information just waiting to be sifted through. However, the one drawback that Al.com has is that it does not host archives. After what appears to be six months, articles are cleared off of the site and are relegated back to the specific newspaper from whence they came, to reside in their archive systems for future searches.

In the end, I really do like this site and I visit it often. Especially to watch the videos.