Good for Patrick and Tracy…
The husband-and-wife team of Patrick Sand and Tracy Record run WestSeattleBlog.com. She is the site’s the primary reporter and editor, while he handles advertising sales and business development. Since January 2006, the pair have covered the bedroom community of West Seattle (over 65,000 residents) seven days a week, 365 days a year. They started selling ads about a year later. The site now has about 60 advertisers and brings in enough to support the couple and their teenage son, and to pay for occasional freelancers. Next on the agenda: hiring a Saturday editor so they get a day off. We spoke with Tracy earlier this week.
Read the full story.
Front Porch Forum Raffle Time! Did you know that it’s been 400 years since the first European laid eyes on our fair lake? Help mark the occasion… fill in the two blanks in the following sentence and post it to your FPF neighborhood forum to enter our raffle…
If I had a _________ for every year since Samuel de Champlain first saw Lake Champlain, I’d have _________.
Do it for fun. Do it for your love of our lake. Do it for a chance to win a prize. Or do it to help enliven your FPF neighborhood forum… But do it by July 1! Here are two efforts…
If I had a PENNY for every year since Samuel de Champlain first saw Lake Champlain, I’d have FOUR DOLLARS.
If I had an INCH OF RAIN for every year since Samuel de Champlain first saw Lake Champlain, I’d have OUR WET SUMMER OF 2009.
FPF members… copy and paste the unfinished sentence into a new email message and fill in the two blanks. Email it to [FPFneighborhoodforumname]@frontporchforum.com or post it via the web by going to http://frontporchforum.com/home, logging in, then clicking Post a Message: Using the Web.
Enter (multiple times if you like) on or before July 1, 2009. Act FAST! Bonus points if your entry has something to do with your neighborhood/town. Prizes as follows (one pair of tickets to each of the following events will be awarded):
July 5 – The Roots
July 5/6/7 – Only Drunks & Children Tell the Truth
July 7 – King Sunny Ade
July 8 – Counterpoint
July 9/10/11 – Territoires Feminins
July 11 – Ween
July 12 – Water Music
July 13/14 – Aurelia’s Oratorio
Thanks to our sponsors: Higher Ground, Burlington International Waterfront Festival and Burlington City Arts! Learn more about the Quadricentennial at http://www.celebratechamplain.org
UPDATE: See the eight winners and many of the other entries!
Pete Peterson wrote a solid piece about Front Porch Forum for Personal Democracy Forum… published today. Please check it out and leave a comment there. Thanks Pete and Micah!
From Mike Lanza today…
I caught a glimpse of the future of mobile phone games this past weekend at the Come Out and Play Festival in New York City last weekend, and I’m very excited.
I played six “location aware mobile games” that made me run and walk like crazy, talk to dozens of people, and explore nooks and crannies of New York that I never would have seen otherwise. In other words, playing these games made me more physically fit, more social (face-to-face), and far more aware of the physical environment that surrounded me.
This is the polar opposite of the effects of today’s video games on children, who play for hours inside their houses without moving anything but their fingers, barely talking to anyone.
It’s a rare computer application that encourages more face-to-face interaction with people in real time and space. That’s one thing that sets Front Porch Forum apart. It’s encouraging to see others moving in this direction.
Peter Krasilovsky offers some interesting points about American Towns current status. Worth a read.
Jeff Jarvis blogged about his latest ideas in “hyper local”… some interesting points, including the comments. Here’s Bob Wyman…
The obvious question is: “Why isn’t Front Porch Forum integrated into the BurlingtonFreePress.com site or the sites of the New York Times, WSJ or other newspapers that serve those in your community?”…
Glad to see another of our society’s megaphone holders catching on to the importance of local. Douglas Rushkoff‘s new book, Life, Inc., apparently gives corporatism the once over and realizes that we’re in kinda deep. Okay.
Further, he prescribes turning real and local as a solution. Here’s a quote from Scott Heiferman‘s review…
84. instead of reconnecting people to their local communities, to one another, or to the value that tey might be able to create for one another, many well-meaning efforts against corp power conect people to abstract ideals and highly centralized organizations… disconnects us further from the truly bottom-up networks through which we can restore human-scaled activity
This is the power of Front Porch Forum. Where it’s working well, it’s catalyzing real, decentralized, non-corporate connections among neighbors who are organizing block parties and knitting clubs, political rallies and casserole brigades for people in need. And for many people, this action is better than what’s served by Comcast, or Facebook, or the WalMart.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more