SCOTT KURNIT Cleveland native's online venture made him rich.

Before the tech bubble burst six years ago, some of our largest technology companies were sure they were headed for huge success in online news and information. Microsoft had its "Sidewalk" product, a series of online-only city guides (including one for Cleveland) that for a time had the newspaper industry running scared. But scarcely two years after it began with a splash, Microsoft had sold it to Ticketmaster. It turned out that the software giant didn't really understand the culture of news and information: Employees of the New York site tellingly complained to the New York Observer that they felt more like data-entry clerks than journalists.

AOL also went after this niche aggressively. For a time, its CitySearch online guides were riding high (you can still see its stickers on the windows of restaurants and other stores around the region). While it's still around, barely, it now feels like a lifeless ghost. These days, most of the attention in this field has turned to Google and Craigslist (which launched a Cleveland site in April '03), and which has flirted with adding citizen journalism to its mostly free classified listings.

Amid all that jockeying of giants, one of the quieter players is also one of the more interesting — About.com. Begun a decade ago as the Mining Company by Cleveland native Scott Kurnit, its motto — the human guide to the Internet — has proven to have some staying power as the Internet shook out. Its prospects improved considerably about a year ago, when the New York Times Co. purchased the site for more than $500 million, in part to serve as a laboratory for its larger online efforts. The parent company recently advertised for the new role of vice president of search technology. In short, this is where journalism is headed.

The Cleveland About.com site (cleveland.about.com) was rudderless for about two years, until the new owners hired a guide, or local editor. Sandy Mitchell, a 40ish resident of Slavic Village, a former travel agent and enthusiastic organic gardener, has been methodically filling the Cleveland section ever since with light but interesting information, from lists of local independent bookstores to the best free activities. Much of the material will be familiar to longtime Clevelanders, but she did break some ground with a well-researched list of films shot on location in this area. Meanwhile, those nearly 1,000 online pages (and growing) are being filled with ads sold by the New York-based sales staff.

Mitchell benefits from instant feedback in the form of traffic data. She knows the three most interesting topics to readers are shopping malls, radio stations and upcoming events. "I get weekly traffic numbers, by page, by day. It's almost too much information," she says. "I put some Akron events in and it got a lot of hits, so that's why I added the Akron section." The bulk of the traffic to the site comes via Google searches.

For the user, About.com has one major weakness. The site's philosophy is to link mostly to other sections in the same network, to drive traffic internally. So instead of linking directly to the subjects she's writing about, she's encouraged to direct link to other About.com sections. "I can go to the About.com system, which has 1.2 million pages and growing. When you've got 500 guides writing every day, it's a huge library." It's just not always the best information available on the web.

SANDY MITCHELL Local "guide."

About.com is, however, beginning to pay dividends to its corporate cousin, NYTimes.com. "We've sent a record number of people to their real estate pages and to their classifieds," she says. "I think their real estate traffic was up by 150 percent."

Meanwhile, a challenge from Craigslist may loom just over the horizon. Founder Craig Newmark (a graduate of Case) has publicly toyed with adding a citizen journalism component to his sites, which are collectively among the most heavily visited on the entire Web. In an e-mail interview, Newmark — just back from Seoul, South Korea, where he met with officials of the world's most successful citizens journalism site, OhMyNews — says the Cleveland site was launched in April '03 with about 1,000 posts per month. It now gets 23 times as many listings, and traffic for the Cleveland site alone is about 7.5 million page views per month. That would be a pretty decent starting point for a local grassroots news and information site.

Sandy Mitchell doesn't seem to spend a moment worrying about all this competition. She keeps adding features and expanding the section's geographic scope (she just can't infringe on the territory of her closest counterparts, in Pittsburgh and Columbus). While the company doesn't release figures, she does say that traffic to the Cleveland site was up about 60 percent from May to June.

With her local presence, she can provide the human touch that others can't. "I got an e-mail from a kid who was going on a first date, and asked for recommendations of where to go." She was only too happy to oblige.

jettorre@voyager.net

workingwithwords.blogspot.com.