Announcing “Newarker.info”:http://newarker.info, devoted to covering the life and times of Newark, NJ from the perspective of the people who live here.
Newarker.info is just a blog and wiki for now, but I’m curious to see if we can ride the wave of the “renaissance” underway in the city of Newark. There seems to be a huge opportunity right now to build an online community for the city as more people take an interest in living and working here. The closest attempts I’ve seen are simply forums (”Newark Speaks”:http://www.newarkspeaks.com/, “The Newarkian”:http://www.newarkian.com/), which lack some of the more interesting features of the web, like RSS feeds.
My time commitments to the project are slim, so if any fellow Newarkers are interested in participating in a group blog, I’d welcome the help. :)
8 Comments
Are you running this?! Wow! Sounds cool and crazy at the same time.
“Scott”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/02/15/blogging-the-renaissance/#1267, if by “running” you mean “occasionally blogging and checking the status of the wiki,” then yes. :) I set up Discussion forums last night, too, though.
Ultimately, I want to create something that can be fairly self-sustaining, using tools that DreamHost provides as a “one-click install,” and encouraging a community to participate. All of the apps (WordPress, MediaWiki, phpBB) support RSS feeds, so I can just subscribe to them to see if anyone is leaving comments, changing the wiki, or starting discussions (which would also help for people looking to moderate, as well). If the site gets popular, maybe it can turn into a Craig’s List type thing with an integrated marketplace, but we’ll see where it goes. :)
It occurred to me the other night that I really have no idea what the market is for this–I know that *I* want it, and Sarah and I know some people our age who are moving into the city, but I have no idea of the numbers of people looking up Newark on the web. I’m kicking around purchasing some Google adwords for $25 to see if anyone clicks through.
Your knowledge of and skills in using technology never cease to amaze me. Keep up the good work!
If I tried to start one of these in my town of Washington, NJ… I bet I could find out who has the shiniest tractor…
Hmm. I wonder who has the shiniest tractor…
I think I’m gonna steal your idea again, Ken. Cause I don’t think I could live any longer without knowing who has the SHINIEST TRACTOR IN WASHINGTON!
“Jai”:http://kennsarah.net/2006/02/15/blogging-the-renaissance/#1270, lol–that’s awesome. Let me know when you start the Tractor Bling Poll.
By the way, are you running DreamHost?
Honestly, I can’t imagine something like this becoming all that popular.
I talked to some neighbors of mine a while back about starting one for the park that I live in, and there was absolutely no interest. Everyone that wanted to be friendly already was by having BBQs or just talking when they see each other, and news spread that way. (You’d be surprised how fast news can spread around the park just by people talking as they get in and out of their cars)
The reason I wanted to start one was to have a central location for park policies to be discussed, news of people coming and going, when improvement projects would impact us, etc …
In your case trying to cover a whole city (and a fairly good size one), wouldn’t it be better to seed information to something like Newsvine.com and just tag everything with “newark” , since most of your blog entries are just quotes of news stories anyway? let them handle the hosting/discussion of your posts.
Most places are too big for people to care about each other, an idea like this would best serve smaller towns … but, in smaller towns (or communities) where everyone knows everyone else it doesn’t really have a place either. Most people that know each other would rather discuss things in person than on a chat board …
on a side note, be careful with phpBB … its got a fair number of security holes … i’ve seen many sites get bitten by that software.
Nah, I’m tunning Host Excellence, K. They’re allright :)
Just wanted to irrelevantly comment on how much I heart Dreamhost.
My soon-to-be site is also running wikimedia, phpBB, and Wordpress. Also Joomla!.