Caroline Little, CEO Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive

Caroline is the keynote speaker at the AOP conference, talking about "The New Online Landscape: Local and Global"

The Washingtonpost.com has worked hard to build up a strong local audience. They find that local visitors come to the site more often, go deeper into the site and consume more pages. Visitors from further afield tend to come in through search engines and only view one or two pages. Sometimes they don't even know the Washington Post.

In fact, it seems that the closer people live to the centre of the city, the more likely they are to view the website and read the paper.

According to Little, many smaller advertisers who don't advertise elsewhere online or even in print have been attracted onto the site by this strong local audience.

Washingtonpost.com is using Pluck's user interaction and social networking platform to enable comments, user profiles and so on.

They have bought 75 small video cameras which they have given reporters to keep with them - they've all been trained in how to use them. This enables them to capture real-life events and stories as they happen, taking advantage of opportunities to create video stories.

They are now focussing on mobile communications - giving their journalists better tools to capture and report stories wherever they are. They are looking at Blackberries and the iPhone as interesting options.

The Post is now producing a lot of widgets and encouraging people to put them on their sites. "It's not just about driving readers to your site," Little says. It can also help promote the site and its brand. For example, they created a "political compass" widget, which asked users a series of questions and then told them where they were on the convervative-liberal spectrum. They served 300k downloads of this widget in the first month. People didn't necessarily click through to the site, but it acted as a branding tool, promoting the site and it's political coverage.

They also encouraged their staff to come up with widgets for the site, and got 30 "really interesting" widgets.