A few weeks ago, I installed a WordPress plugin that made it easy to browse this Locally Grown blog via a web browser on a mobile phone. It worked on my G1 but unfortunately, not on the iPhone. Earlier this week, Felicity Enders alerted me to a different plugin (WPTouch). I installed it and voila! it now works for the iPhone, iPod touch, Android (Google), and BlackBerry touch mobile devices. (continued)
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Continue reading Podcast: Guest Tim Freeland on retailers using social media
1) Tweet, tweet is retailers’ new ho, ho, ho; and 2) Social animal: Best Buy’s holiday strategy is all about tweets, friends and its very own Twelpforce. Continue reading Northfield retailers: making use of social networking for the holidays?
I wrote to my favorite web host, Tiger Technologies in California, asking them if they knew about it the worm and whether they could tell if any sites had been compromised. The owner, Robert Mathews, wrote me back within a few minutes: Continue reading WordPress under attack; upgrade ASAP to 2.8.4
Once I learned how to how to download waypoints from Geocaching.com to my PC (a current bug prevents downloading via the G1’s browser) and then import them into a $10 app called Geodroid, things got a lot easier. There are currently 46 caches hidden within a 3-mile radius of Northfield’s 55057 zip code. On Thursday, I thought I’d try one in the Carleton Arb.
FYI, Carleton has some guidelines on hiding geocaches and letterboxes in the Arb. What’s letterboxing?
That’s from this NY Times story: You’ve Got Voice Mail, but Do You Care? “In an age of instant information gratification, the burden of having to dial in to a mailbox, enter a passcode and sit through “um’s” and “ah’s” from unwanted callers can seem too much to bear.” Email? That’s so 1999 for the under-30 crowd. See Younger workers and the demise of e-mail. I hope staff at our public institutions are making changes to accommodate this shift.
Demetrio gave a presentation on using social media and on-line communication to promote your main street, or downtown district, at the Main Street 2.0 Conference. He works at Community Media Workshop, also found at “newstips.org“. I guess if I were to try to summarize their mission, it would be to help the voiceless find their voices through new media. (continued) Continue reading Demetrio Maguigad Tells Me to Twitter at Main Street 2.0
I’m here to provide an update, and to try to get more Northfielders to try out this technology. Maybe we can become the first community of microblogging, hyperlocal, placebloggers. (continued) Continue reading TWITTER redux
Continue reading What needs to be changed with the City of Northfield’s web site?
I’m interested in seeing how people use various websites and technologies in both business and social networking, so I joined. This group membership is open to all, so if you’re on LinkedIn, please join. If you don’t use LinkedIn, check it out and see if it might work for you.
With streaming videos, image files flow to a video player on a Web site in a continuous stream and play when they arrive. Before streaming technology, a Web user would have to download an entire file before watching a video, which could take a long time. Reeder referenced Burnsville’s Web site as an example of a nearby community that uses streaming video. Continue reading City could stream video by 2010 A year ago, Tracy announced that we’d begun using a service called Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) that allows people who add comments here to put a face to their name. Many of you who regularly comment have already set up your Gravatar. For example, here’s a snapshot of 8 comments attached to the Sweet Lou’s post: Continue reading Git yer Gravatar! Limited-time offer! Operators are standing by! Not available in stores! Nate Jacobi, Assistant Director for Civic Engagement at St. Olaf’s Center for Experiential Learning, has alerted us to their Google map mashup “highlighting over 50 Northfield-area Community Organizations (nonprofits, schools and city/government agencies).” Attach a comment if you see any problems with it or if there are resources that should be included.
It was a full house for last night’s Fiber Optic Feasibility Study open house at Northfield City Hall. Melissa Reeder, IT director for the City of Northfield, hosted the meeting, with the presentation by Doug Dawson, the fiber feasibility consultant from CCG Consulting. See Melissa’s comments on the meeting. I’ve closed comments on this blog post in favor of continuing the conversation there. See the album of 11 photos (including photos of flip charts) or this slideshow:
When things broke, we decided to put up a new theme for Locally Grown that we’d begun working on this past summer but never finished. Sean Hayford O’Leary did the heavy lifting on the new theme, with some collaboration with Tracy. So let us know what you like/don’t like, what problems you see, what suggestions you have. And take the straw poll! [poll id="19"]
Here on Locally Grown, we get about 60,000 pageviews/month. I don’t put too much emphasis on pageviews for a blog — any blog — because so much of the content appears on the home page and doesn’t require much mousing around the site… especially one like LG because we don’t generally break up long blog posts. Visitors to our blogsite generally check the home page for the latest and then depart. So I pay most attention to our monthly unique visitors (6,000+) as measured by Google Analytics. But a nudge from one of my sons made me curious about how Locally Grown and the web sites for Northfield.org and Northfield News are ranked by 1) Google Page Rank and 2) Alexa. (I’ve linked to the Wikipedia entries for those two for a more unbiased view of their strengths and weaknesses.) Here’s the current info for all three sites:
There are probably many factors to take into consideration when trying to assess the traffic to these three sites. For example, both Northfield.org and Locally Grown host their photos with commercial photo services (Flickr and Picasaweb, respectively) so traffic to the photo galleries isn’t counted, unlike Northfield News which hosts their own photos. Also, both Northfield.org and Locally Grown provide RSS feeds to readers who want to aggregate blog content and/or discussion. People who get content via their RSS newsreaders don’t generate pageviews. The Northfield News doesn’t provide RSS feeds. I’m not a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) expert or consultant, nor have I read much about the pros and cons of the two popular ranking systems. But it seems misleading for the Northfield News to use the headline in their ad, “Click here for Northfield’s largest online audience.” And I think they should reveal their unique visitors per month if they’re going to use the phrase ‘largest online audience’ in their advertising. Truth be told: Carleton is the true champ for Northfield area web site traffic. And among the sites selling banner ads, Northfield.org appears to beat the Northfield News handily.
According to the city’s attorney, when Monticello asked TDS Telecom to provide fiber-optic connections to every home and business in the community as a means of stimulating economic development and increasing the quality of life, the company refused. The city then held a referendum in which about 75 percent of the voters approved spending $25 million in revenue bonds to create a city-owned system. TDS filed its lawsuit the day before the revenue bonds were to be issued. The company claims that it was willing to work with the city, but couldn’t come to terms. The lawsuit contends that municipalities shouldn’t be allowed to use revenue bonds to create fiber-optic infrastructure. There have been several conversations, by both public and private entities, in Northfield over the past few years about making Northfield one of the most wired communities in the world. If I recall correctly, then Council and EDA member Dixon Bond suggested that it could be considered like any other utility, and provided publicly or privately. It appears, at least to me, that no group stepped up to provide leadership in the effort. Perhaps now we’ll have to wait for the lawsuit to be settled.
Apparently every Northfield area landline with a 645 exchange got a vishing scam phone call yesterday. We got a voicemail at our house. The scam prompts you to dial a number to reactivate your bank ATM or debit card.
I’m heading to the Minnesota Journalism Center at the Univ. of Minnesota later this morning for a conference titled New Pamphleteers/New Reporters: Convening Entrepreneurs Who Combine Journalism, Democracy, Place and Blogs. It’s one of a ongoing series of national conferences from the Journalism That Matters team. The RepJ team will be attending, too, and so we’ll be talking about Locally Grown, the Northfield civic blogosphere, and the rest of the local media here in Northfield. The vigilante blogging post and subsequent discussion is relevant to all this, so I do want to continue dealing with issues raised there. Randy Jennings has graciously agreed to be on upcoming LG podcast to talk about this stuff, so stay tuned for that. |
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With 
Didn’t you get my message?” parents ask. “No,” their children reply, “but I saw that you called.”
Over the past few weeks, Griff and Ross and I have been talking with specific community members about the idea of becoming Contributing Bloggers on Locally Grown. A few of our new contributors have posts in the works, and we’re looking forward to the added dimension these voices will bring to our content and discussions here. Watch this space for the new bylines!
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