“I want to put his business on the cover of the phone book,” the man said. “How’s that sound? Huh?” The man brushed rain off his shoulders and then slicked back his hair.

I’ll avoid any spoilers here. Go give it a read.

Paul Jahn has a bit of a cheese shop photography habit, but managed to break it up with this TP shot from the Madison West Holiday Inn. It would be nice to see the Holiday Inn devote an additional 2 seconds per room to improve the quality of their folds.

No word on whether Snoop was chillin‘.

Very little activity was noted at the house…

…and, for a long time, a phone book sat moldering on the porch. Yes, I know I’ve said a lot of harsh things about phone book dumping by Dex and other companies, but sometimes–though rarely–you can glean useful information based on the presence of a rotting phone book. In this case, there just didn’t seem to be much activity at the house. But one day, a FOR RENT sign appeared out front.

Perhaps Mr. Chism will agree that rotting phone books can be a burden, since their presence is a good indicator that a property is either unoccupied, poorly cared for, or both?

Let’s assume for a second that Mr. Chism actually was living at the address he claimed to reside at on Emerson Ave N. In that case, he chose to ignore the phone books rotting on his front steps, thus contributed to the blight of the community he claimed he planned to clean up if elected. That’s a bit of a disconnect in my book.

In the story, they cite the following page views and unique visitor stats from Nielsen (a reputable source for website traffic reporting).

Site MPR MinnPost StarTribune
Page Views 251,000 251,000 55,000,000
Unique Visitors 67,000 79,000 2,000,000

On thing that stood out to me was that the StarTribune has a MUCH higher page views to unique visitors ratio than the other two websites. Here is what that looks like in a chart:

See what I’m saying?

So, what accounts for this difference? Here are my theories.

1. Pagination. It takes four pages to read something on the Strib that would take one page to read on either of the other two websites.

2. Comment cesspool. The site generates a ton of comments because it seems to let almost anything through, which of course generates additional page views and content for others to react to, no matter how bigoted.

3. Paginated comments. They then split up the comments into groups of 10, which generates even more page views.

4. Auto-Refresh. If you spend more than 10 minutes on the Strib, the site decides that you must want your page refreshed. Sure, you may be out for coffee, sleeping, or stuck under something heavy, but that doesn’t stop the StarTribune from “earning” additional page views because you happened to leave their website open in your browser.

5. Classifieds. The Strib seems to keep people on their primary domain for at least another page view before dropping people onto subdomains for things like new and used car searches.

6. Depth of coverage. Yes, they also generate more page views based on content. MPR and MinnPost don’t devote nearly as many resources to covering the pro and college sports franchises, nationally syndicated television shows, video game reviews, or what people are buying from Target this season. While I wouldn’t consider any of this to be news, it is certainly something that can be bundled alongside journalism in order to keep people on your site for more page views per visitor on average.

If MPR and MinnPost want to be more like the StarTribune, they should take on a ton of debt, start treating their online readers like crap, and publish more non-newsworthy content.

Starting from the NE corner of NE Minneapolis, I did a run through the Waite Park and Columbia Park neighborhoods.

Heading West along 37th, bordering Columbia Heights, I the Korean First Baptist Church.

At University Ave NE, I stopped to check out the view of the Minneapolis skyline.

Hi-View Park, at Main St & 35th Ave NE, isn’t on the highest point in the neighborhood, but it’s close.

After some zigging and zagging through residential streets near Hi-View Park, I headed South on Main St to St. Anthony Parkway, where I sound this view of the massive train yard with the skyline in distance.

Heading East on St. Anthony Parkway, I passed Columbia Golf Course’s driving range, which had the lights on but no takers.

However, the dog park across the street had plenty of action.

Minneapolis’ Grand Rounds Scenic Byway of interconnected parkways has some of its hilliest terrain in Northeast, including this section to the West of Central Ave NE along Deming Heights Park.

Bikers get a shout-out on this interpretive sign at this intersection. Click the image for a larger version if you’re interested in actually reading it.

A few blocks later, I passed Mt Carmel Lutheran Church where people knit on Wednesday nights.