Talk about the MAPS 3 initiative has taken over the Oklahoma City metropolitan area.

Every MAPS votes seems to do that. Some people love the idea. Some people are opposed. And rarely to people with such strong opinions change their minds about a subject they are so passionate about.

But these issues are decided at the polls. Eligible voters will educate themselves, make a decision and cast their vote

That’s where we come in. NewsOK has put together a MAPS 3 coverage page with a bunch of information and details about the projects and the upcoming vote.

You can see:

• An interactive timeline about the downtown development, dating back to the 1980s
• A twitter feed from users that tag their posts #maps3
• An archive of articles written about the proposal in recent months
• All the videos we’ve produced on the subject, including some of the descriptive information about the proposed projects
• Photo galleries with artist renderings and images of the proposed enhancements

Learn more about the proposals. Then vote on Dec. 8.

The Oklahoman unveiled a special section with its Sunday newspaper yesterday. It’s the annual “College Bound” section – and it’s full of information for high school students and their parents who are looking at going to college in the next few years.

It’s all about choosing the right college, finding ways to make it affordable, finding scholarship opportunities, connecting with classmates, testing, timelines and tips.

Basically, it has everything you need to educate yourself on the college-planning process. It’s all online right now at NewsOK’s College Bound page.

We built it. We want you to use it.

Local Editor Michael Baker and a few members of his reporting team – John Estus and Bryan Dean – pulled off a nice multimedia package last week.

They enlisted the help of web editor Nick Tankersley, art director Todd Pendleton and graphic artist Brian Mays to effectively tell the story about the  battle between the Oklahoma City firefighters and city officials.

We have three articles, a video interview and four informational graphics to help tell help describe the details of this story — which range from arguments about excessive overtime pay, contract negotiations and incident rates.

It was an experiment for us. Can we tell an hard news, ongoing coverage piece in a way different than we normally do.

We think it worked this time. And we’ll do something to take it a step further next time.

I clicked on the video above from the NewsOK home page this morning.

Classic stuff. Quality entertainment.

Now I see what sports editor Mike Sherman has been talking about. This stuff is a bit different. You can’t help but be part amused, part shocked, part horrified — but completely entertained and informed.

Yes … in this one three-minute clip, we see Gerald McCoy profess his love for Sam Bradford (see ’shocked’) and Adrian Taylor sing country music (see ‘horrified’).

You can see the entire series this season on the College Football Preview page on NewsOK. It’s a page based on the theme of “Oklahoma Idol” and it has all the preview stories and videos for the college football season. We’ll be adding more amusing, shocking and horrifying videos from the players and our Idol hosts throughout the season.

Maybe we’ll eventually get to hear Mike Sherman sing. I’ve heard it before … all previously used adjectives can properly describe that experience.

Monday was a big day for NewsOK.com in terms of page views.

The program for the funeral of Carol Daniels is pictured in Oklahoma City on Aug. 31, 2009. (AP Photo/Sue Ogrocki)

We had a story that simply went off the charts on our Top Ten Most-Viewed Articles page. The story was written by reporter Nolan Clay, and it first appeared in The Oklahoman on Sunday. It contained details about the death of Oklahoma City pastor in the Anadarko church. the details are chilling, indeed – which is precisely why the traffic was so  high on the story.

The Drudge Report picked up the story and linked to it from its Web site, bringing hundreds of thousands of intrigued internet browsers to NewsOK.com. The Drudge Report links to us fairly often (once a month or so) – and that’s a compliment, I’m sure. It means we often  have stories that have a wide interest. And it means we often have reporters that will not stop until they can give readers the information they want.

We built an Ongoing Coverage page to The Anadarko Church Killing so we can properly allow interested visitors to browser the history of the story. We are also allowing comments to be shared on this story – a step we’ve taken in the past for stories in which we feel the public demand for conversation outweighs our stated intentions on our commenting policy.

Perhaps most importantly, you can share your condolences with friends and family of Carol Daniels in her online guestbook on NewsOK.

Take time to see all the articles, graphics, videos and comments about this ongoing story. Nobody has been arrested yet, but I can guarantee that we will cover this story thoroughly until we know the resolution

High school football practices started last week.

It was Tuesday, to be exact. That was also the same day we launched our new initiative in covering high school sports better than anyone else.

It’s called Varsity, and the main idea is this – we are putting sports reporters on specific coverage areas and blogging about those schools every day. We aren’t structuring our high school sports coverage around events and sports anymore. Instead, we are focusing our coverage in the same ways the fans focus their interests – the schools.

The new coverage solution comes directly from the mind of sports editor Mike Sherman, who hatched his plan early this summer. From there, NewsOK web editors Nick Tankersley and Dane Beavers thought about how to leverage our existing blogs to best accomplish our goals. Add some designers, some marketing professionals and some strong developers, and poof — Varsity is born.

You’ll see that Sherman has thought a lot about how to organize his team of reporters. There are specific pages and specific blogs for all the largest areas of interest around Oklahoma City, plus pages that coverage private schools, Oklahoma City schools (including Douglass, Star Spencer and Millwood) and all the rest (including powerhouse programs like Guthrie to the north, Washington to the south, Clinton to the west and Jenks and Union to the east).

And we’re not done. We will be adding more functionality in the coming weeks. You’ll see the ability to upload your photos, the ability to post to eh page using Twitter and the most updated team and player stats in the state.

In the meantime, become a fan of Varsity on Facebook or follow our blogging network on Twitter.

The latest edition of Viva Oklahoma! was released on Sunday.

You can see the Web site at all times from the link on the NewsOK sub-navigation under Home. Or you can simply bookmark http://www.vivaoklahoma.com.

I used to work on this publication each month, while I was the Director of Custom Publishing here at OPUBCO Communications Groups. I understand how hard the passionate people who write, organize and design the product work to make it happen.

And I’ve seen it steadily improve since I changed roles in October of 2008. I know the team that focuses on Viva Oklahoma! works diligently to build partnerships in the Latino community in Oklahoma City so that it can make a positive impact and offer important information and advertising that is useful to people within the community.

The Guide to a Strong and Healthy Oklahoma book is a fine example of that. The book has been printed in Spanish and is currently available at newsstands where you can find Viva Oklahoma! The book full of health information for Oklahomans is featured on this month’s cover of Viva Oklahoma!

You can see the entire publication in PDF form on the Viva Oklahoma! home page, or you can simply browse our articles, photos and videos.

A couple of weeks ago, The Oklahoman ran its final chapters of the “Jim Chastain: Life is Real” series.

The good news is that the series ends with Jim continuing the fight and living with cancer. And our page on NewsOK, complete with Jim’s blog will continue on.

Reporter Ken Raymond shared his thoughts with a story that ran in The Oklahoman and on NewsOK:

After the last chapter that I wrote, the Chastains decided they didn’t want to subject themselves to that scrutiny anymore. The last story talked about displaced anger. When people are upset about something they can’t control, such as a dying spouse or father, they tend to direct their anger and helplessness at other targets, ones that are easier to hit. It happened in my family twice: first when my Dad died of pancreatic cancer and second when my Mom died, years later, of breast and lung cancer. It didn’t do any good to yell at the cancer, so we yelled at each other.

It’s true stuff. It’s real. But it’s not very pretty.

Our columnist Charlotte Lankard, who is also a close friend of Jim’s, shared her thoughts in our final chapter as well:

None of us should be surprised then that Jim’s family has found living in a fish bowl for the entire world to see uncomfortable, unsettling and invasive. They have made a significant contribution to this dialogue, but now they have asked to pull back a bit from the spotlight – and we will honor that.

Charlotte will also continue blogging as the series goes on.

You can read the blogs and share your thoughts with each of them. Ken’s blog will continue to be archived on the page, as will the previous chapters and the videos from videographer/photgrapher John Clanton.

The Pharmacy Shooting story gets more and more interesting.

In case you missed it this weekend in The Oklahoman or on NewsOK, the story took another turn with a copyrighted story from The Oklahoman on Sunday.

Reporter Nolan Clay details the three different accounts of the events that Jerome Ersland has told since the day of the shooting. You can see links to key documents, including excerpts from his police interview.

There’s not much I can add to this story, other than to say that it’s easy to identify an important story and quality reporting when you see it.

You might not know about it right now, but I have a funny feeling you’re going to become very aware of it before the weekend is over.

The Bricktown H.O.G. Rally (Harley Owners Group) is this weekend (Friday and Saturday) in various areas of Oklahoma City. We built a special page to cover the event on NewsOK.com. There’s also plenty of details about the event on wimgo.

But the primary purpose of this blog post is to have you send us your photos of the event as you snap them over the weekend. We’ve partnered with Share it Live – an iPhone application which was developed and is managed by our own development professionals at OPUBCO Communications Group. We’ve used the API for the application to build embedded functionality on NewsOK.com.

Now, you can post photos on our Hog Rally page or you can upload them through the Share it Live iPhone application. We hope you do a little of both. But we really encourage you to download the application to your iPhone so you can get used to sharing your images in that way.

We want to see how uploaded photos can help us tell the story of an event like this. We know Share it live is a simple way to share photos. It makes sense for us to use that functionality on NewsOK.com.