Nice Start, LAPD!

We’ve been closely following the early days of the Los Angeles Police Department’s new blog. Ruben de la Torre of the LAPD was at our Essentials of Business Blogging Seminar in Los Angeles and did a podcast interview with me to talk about the process of getting the LAPD blog-ready.

The blog’s content is very interesting, covering local crime, community initiatives, and recruitment while responding to newspaper edtiorials and encouraging participation. Chief of Police William J. Bratton laid out the goals of the LAPD’s blogging strategy:

By using this Blog, the LAPD hopes to maintain an open dialogue with the communites we serve and those who have an interest in the men and women of this organization. We encourage you to express your opinions about current events through respectful and insightful discussion. We reserve the right to refuse to post those comments that contain inappropriate language and/or material. In the near future, we intend to expand our Blogging capabilities to all 19 Area Stations.

We think it’s fantastic that the LAPD wants to extend their blogging even further, and to that end, we have a few constructive criticisms.

1) Fix the DNS. It looks like they’re using DNS forwarding from their registered lapdblog.org domain name to their Typepad hosted domain name at lapdblog.typepad.com. The problem is that they’re not allowing users to see the actual domain name, only the .org name - which doesn’t have an RSS feed. Users who want to subscribe may find it tricky to track down the feed URL. For the record, here’s a link to their actual feed.

2) Find a long-term hosting solution. While this original hosting solution is great to start off with, the blog is eventually going to expand to meet the Chief’s stated goal of covering all 19 Area Stations. To keep all the blogs neatly organized, the department may want to look at using Movable Type to host all of it’s blogs at its original website.

This is also good for search engine visibility. Obviously, Google juice isn’t as important to the LAPD as it might be to a corporation that has competitors and needs to engage in aggressive search engine marketing, but even so - diverting Google juice is never a good idea.

3) Have a designer create a custom template. Whether or not you plan to host the blog on your own site or keep it in TypePad, a custom template can help clarify your business blog from all of the personal blogs out there hosted on the same service. Building a distinctive-looking blog is part of brand clarity.

We’re very proud to have played even a small role in this great blog. You’re in our RSS readers, LAPD!