Only the geekiest of our regular users will probably care about this one, but I'm pretty psyched about it:

One of the things we want to do this year is improve our "bounce rate." That's people who hit our site because of a search somewhere on the Interwebs, read that page and then disappear into the ether.

The problem is that even though we know and you know that this isn't your average everyday news site, searchers often hit a page that might not communicate that very quickly so they get what they came for and move on.

My tipping point on this was the umpteenth call I went on with members of our sales team where the prospect said "I've never heard of you," only to recant when they saw a page of the site in front of them. It's a long, arduous battle to brand yourself in this day and age -- and we weren't happy to wait for nature to take its course.

So, we've added what the dev team has dubbed "search hooks" to virtually every type of page on the site. If you are logged in or coming from a bookmark, you should never see them.

BUT, if you're a noob you'll get a little gently-invasive notice, customized by the type of page you're looking at, letting you know about other things you might want to check out.

So if I I'm not logged in and hit David Gouldin's podcast on the DCTA on Google News, I get a page that looks like this. (Actually the page loads and then the tease drops down):

Or if I search for tonight's They Might Be Giants show on Google and click into the site, it looks like this:

Will be interesting to see how much impact this makes on registration and the overall activity in our community.