AP's new video service has emerged from its beta test period and you can expect to start seeing it on potentially thousands of local newspaper and broadcast websites.

It's an experiment with a new business model for the AP, which is a membership organization. Typically members pay "assessments" for various levels of service. This project is different: members pay nothing and theoretically can make money by sharing in network advertising revenues.

It's all being done in partnership with MSN, which provides not only the technology but sells advertising on the video service. But Microsoft, as usual, has delivered a nonstandard implementation, one that won't run unless you have a PC running a recent version of Internet Explorer. Firefox? Macintosh? Linux? Tough luck, you're out.

AP has been catching hell from the members about the compatibility issue (and I've been providing some of it myself). I'm told that MSN is -- perhaps reluctantly -- going to address it for Firefox. What that means for Mac users is not yet clear.

This will put some newspaper sites in an odd position of having content on their websites that their own newsrooms can't see. Many newspaper newsrooms are still running OS 9 Macintoshes, unable to take advantage of modern Web standards, much less Microsoft-only services.

It seems that everywhere I go, I hear a lot of talk about the advantage our newspapers have in that they have the strong, trusted brand in our communities. But here's a story that is circulating in the industry that turns the table on that belief.

A major newspaper recently conducted some focus groups to understand consumer perceptions of its online entertainment content. The content was very good, but usage was low. Consumers seemed to prefer to use other entertainment guide / calendaring services from net-centric companies.

One participant cut through the fog. Why, he asked, would I got to Pizza Hut when I want a chicken sandwich?

Strong brands are indeed an asset, but we can't lose sight of the fact that they stand for something, and sometimes that something is out of sync with demand. Tinkering with the "core product" may amount to adding chicken sandwiches to a pizza menu.

Last week at the NAA Marketing Conference in Orlando, Arizona Republic VP Karen Crotchfelt gave a compelling presentation about the company's multiproduct "audience aggregation" strategy. Apparently Publisher John Zidich gave a similar presentation in Paris. It's a tale of about a dozen product lines, each carefully tuned to connect with a specific segment in a market with tremendous geographic, ethnic and age diversity. By creating, acquiring and heavily promoting new brands, the Republic has built itself back into the market-dominating position newspapers owned a generation ago.

And here's an interesting tidbit: the Republic projects that by 2008, the AZCentral.com website will be the "core product" in terms of connecting with an 18-39 audience. That's something to think about.

Last week in Orlando at the NAA Connections conference, Lisa Desisto of the Boston Globe was given the NAA's online innovator award. In her gracious acceptance speech she acknowledged her two fellow finalists -- Dave Morgan of Tacoda Systems as "father of targeted advertising" and me as "father of citizen journalism." This, of course, immediately prompted a round of jokes in my corner of the room about illegitimate offspring.

I've never thought of myself as the father of citizen journalism. I'll accept some credit for a decade of beating the drum for participation, but I don't want to go farther than that.

It made me stop and think: Can anyone be the father of citizen journalism? I don't think it's possible.

It's a spontaneous phenomenon, a completely natural outgrowth of the personal publishing power that is inherent in the Internet. And it isn't just a result of the blogging craze. Back in the last century I referred to "a new kind of people's journalism" and the landscape at that time was dominated by sites like Angelfire, where the typical site was a rarely updated collection of jumping frogs and background sounds. I was thinking of those sites, but also of online group discussions (which have been around since 1973), photo galleries, and so forth. When people can tell their own stories, they do.

The CitJ label continues to be troublesome, and I'm not the only one who has issues with it. On the one hand, I strongly believe it's a type of journalism -- and on the other hand, the term "journalism" conjures up such powerful and specific expectations, left over from the era of mass media, that we are led into a thicket of confusion and arguments and harebrained ideas like the NUJ's "witness contributions" code.

Back in the last century when I was at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, we built one of the first online traffic maps. It definitely wasn't the first even in the local market -- a local tech development firm had already built one as a demonstration. We considered using theirs, didn't like their terms, and assigned a programmer to create our own. It took some time, some socket-level Perl programming, some artwork and some creative uses of ImageMagick. MNDOT was happy to provide the data. A few weeks later we had it online.

That traffic map has been rebuilt several times over the years and is still around, but it's not any better and in fact is not as good as the original.

Today the climate is different. There's a whole genre of website, often developed quickly by an individual, using a technique called "mashup" in which Web services from a number of directions are combined into a single result. Adrian Holovaty's ChicagoCrime.org is an example.

I discovered that someone is building a mashup of traffic data, Google's mapping interface, and Google's Adsense revenue program at www.minneapolistrafficmap.com. I don't know who's doing it (the "about" page is blank, and the GoDaddy domain registration is cloaked). But it looks like the kind of thing that an entrepreneurial programmer could whack together in his/her spare time and, because of AdSense, create a small personal revenue stream.

The mashup actually has much more detailed information than the Star Tribune's map.

And I see that 10 years later, MNDOT still doesn't have any pavement sensors in the northeast quadrant, despite the notoriety of the I-694/I-35E intersection as a favorite place for trucks to tip or jackknife in winter weather. Fortunately I don't drive there any more.