This week, TBO.com offers a lighthearted yet arguably scrooge-like piece entitled the Ten Worst Christmas Songs. Despite your holiday affiliation, your stance on talk about Christmas before Thanksgiving, and your musical preferences, this posting to Tampa Bay Online is an impressive work of multimedia production.

In addition to the written list of the ten worst Christmas songs and descriptions of what makes them awful, TBO.com posted an interactive song player with each bad song listed.

<table style=”width:auto;”><tr><td><a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/fdfk2MkGO-Bc6-EwxAyJOQ?feat=embedwebsite”><img src=”http://lh5.ggpht.com/_NjbvgiNkOeE/SwRfbM5AtVI/AAAAAAAAA4s/u8Tc0LtrlI0/s288/10%20worst%20songs.png” /></a></td></tr><tr><td style=”font-family:arial,sans-serif; font-size:11px; text-align:right”>From <a href=”http://picasaweb.google.com/kmdediego/PhotoBlog?feat=embedwebsite”>Photo blog</a></td></tr></table>

Users must only click on the song title to initiate playback–easy, intuitive and very user-friendly.

Side note: over the past couple months, I have been a tough critic in my analysis of TBO.com, mostly because of its local content and busy layout, but lately, I have realized the site’s multimedia effort and begun to appreciate it. Still, the site could use the work of a competent web designer, but overall, Tampa Bay Online deserves my kudos for being the only local news outlet that I have seen that has dived into the online-multimedia revolution with such enthusiasm.

So, thank you, Tampa Bay Online, for providing us with a tease of the holiday season, a display of holiday mockery (even if a week too early), and most of all, a work of multimedia innovation.

This was the only news source I saw today that offered an online forum for site visitors. The New York Times posted a story about the president giving a eulogy at Fort Hood, and Boston.com offered stories on local veterans. But TBO.com’s forum was interactive and invited conversation on a particularly weighty Veteran’s Day (considering the current debate about sending more troops to Afghanistan and considering the recent tragedy at Fort Hood army base.)

In the morning, Veteran’s Day messages filled Twitter’s live feed, showcasing messages of gratitude. That’s where we found this touching video of soldier returning home and surprising his son at school.

Then I found videos of soldiers returning home to their pets–a little less heart-wrenching and more heart-warming. Enjoy.

Even if it’s just a virtual chocolate cake on a screen like the one TBO.com has posted on its homepage today.

From Photo blog

Contributing writers from the Tampa Bay Tribune wrote a piece for Tampa Bay Online Food section about the (apparently) deliciously divine chocolate-bacon culinary combination. While the recipe for the Bacon Devil’s Food Cake didn’t suck me into trying it, the picture caught my eye and made me click, which brought me to the Food section of TBO.com–home to chef Jeff Houck’s blog, “The Stew.”

Located under the Lifestyle tab of TBO.com’s homepage, the food section offers the latest news on all things food related (restaurant openings, recipes, maps of where to find wineries, and so on) via The Stew blog.

From Photo blog

Chef Jeff Houck posts on the latest food news–his last one highlighting the opening of a new restaurant in the Tampa area.

Past The Stew is a recipe finder tool with an extensive search criteria, including: dairy free, gluten free, low fat, low carb, sugar free, vegan and vegetarian options. The results are not as extensive as the search criteria, but this recipe finder is still a useful and user-friendly tool to help decide what to make for dinner.

(Produced by Katelyn de Diego)

TBO.com Community page offers a searchable calendar of the events going on in and around Tampa neighborhoods. This feature of TBO.com, called TBO EXTRA, is not only a service to residents of the Tampa area looking for entertainment opportunities, but it is also a valuable resource to Tampa Bay journalists.

Recently I have used similar event calenders on Boston.com, HarvardSquare.com, and BU.edu and found them very helpful in finding newsworthy and timely stories on which to report.

TBO EXTRA sorts the events on by genre, including: arts & crafts, business & technology, food & dining, dance, education, music, performing arts and more. Additionally, the site offers a “buy tickets now” option for popular events that require paid reservations.

Tampa area residents can even create their own events on TBO EXTRA to be included in other residents searches for events in the area.

One thing that Boston.com offers under its Things To Do tab is a chronological list of the day’s events. TBO EXTRA should accommodate this simple addition; doing so would communicate a understanding of why users come to the event site: to know what is going on, not just in the future, but now.

I noticed, this week, a subtitle on Tampa Bay Online that read “Latest News Photos.” Excited at the prospect of a multimedia find, I clicked. But of the twenty slideshows offered, four of the “latest” ones showcased photos of Fourth of July festivities—not exactly what I would call the latest news. Having just clicked through a slideshow on Santa Cruz Sentinel online about the worst rainstorm my hometown had seen in over forty years, I knew that aesthetically pleasing slideshows can be created on even the most basic of sites. But scanning through the other photos offered on Santa Cruz Sentinel online, I realized that the rainstorm slideshow was the latest slideshow the photo team had produced for three weeks. But pictures should be in the news every day!

Multiple news photo slideshows should be shot, edited and uploaded every day to national and local sites alike. The process is easy (or easily learned), but more than that, photo slideshows encompass what online-news readers are all about: absorbing information in a small amount of time and clicks.

Tampa Bay Online offers stories every day that would benefit from a visual aid. On their site today is a story about Tampa Bay Online employees bringing their own coffee mugs to the office. The writer says the mugs serve as a self-expression vehicle. The story even references a photographer shooting the different mugs, but no link to the photo is listed. This story is begging for a photo slideshow of the employees and their mugs! Perhaps the silver-lining of this visual void is the opportunity out there for trained multimedia journalists like me to find jobs aesthetically improving news websites.

From Photo blog

While navigating here is easy, the existence of Tampa Bay Online’s swine flu page is not prominent. In fact, when taken to a swine flu story featured on the homepage, hyperlinks to TBO.com’s swine flu coverage Mecca are no where to be found. So, it seems, the only way to access this extensive coverage is through the top menu drop down bar under News. Still, Tampa Bay Online’s swine flu page provides adequate flu information in multiple reporting platforms. Most impressively, the page features reports on statewide cases of swine flu through an interactive map that shows the state’s number of deaths and hospitalizations due to the disease; site visitors can scroll over each county to read the swine flu statistics for the area.

From Photo blog

Below, TBO.com provides useful links for national statistics on the flu outbreak, and links to the Center for Disease Control, to an interactive “Flu Tracker” website, and to the Florida Department of health. A Swine Flu Stories tab directs readers to local and national text stories pertaining to the swine flu epidemic.

Finally, a Frequently Asked Questions and Resources section provide a guide to preventing, recognizing and treating swine flu. Here, Tampa Bay Online lists the symptoms of the H1N1 disease, and also provides prevention and treatment tips.

In addition to the relevant swine flu video packages, a live Twitter feed on swine flu keeps site visitors up to date on the latest flu reports.

Interestingly, CNN’s health page online did not offer equally extensive coverage on the swine flu. CNN.com demonstrated the flu’s national spread through a map, but the information is general.