Catch the Buzz!
Ian Duncan is an NYU Journalism student who found our very own Anthony Lobosco on the NY Tech Meet-Up last month. The following is an excerpt from an article Ian wrote about NY based, hyper-local internet start-ups:
Anthony Lobosco, founder of neighborbee, first had the idea for a local information service when he was living in Tribeca at the time of the 9/11 attacks. He was acutely aware of how difficult it was to connect with his neighbors and find out what was going on amid the chaos.
“People are starving for local information,” he said. “There’s a lot of information on large, global social networks, but there is a need for people to find out what’s going on in their neighborhood.”
After three years of operating as a volunteer-run blog, neighborbee will launch localized social networks – cutely named ‘hives’ – this Spring. While some landlords have set up their own sites, Lobosco thinks it is important for residents to have direct control. “There’s no Big Brother who’s looking down,” he said. “If the management company doesn’t like it, it should get things fixed.”
The new neighborbee will enable you to find out what’s happening on your block and connect with your neighbors.
Here are three blog posts announcing the site and talking about our new strategy:
From the hive: there’s going to be a new neighborbee
From the hive: Citizen Journalism
neighborbee update – bending WordPress
Tags:
neighborbee,
NY Tech Meetup
Mark Glaser, a freelance journalist who frequently writes on new media issues, said in 2006:
The idea behind citizen journalism is that people without professional journalism training can use the tools of modern technology and the global distribution of the Internet to create, augment or fact-check media on their own or in collaboration with others. For example, you might write about a city council meeting on your blog or in an online forum. Or you could fact-check a newspaper article from the mainstream media and point out factual errors or bias on your blog. Or you might snap a digital photo of a newsworthy event happening in your town and post it online. Or you might videotape a similar event and post it on a site such as YouTube.
For the past three years, neighborbeeBLOGGERs have been citizen journalists reporting on events, social issues and a variety of other subjects specific to New York City, including the five boroughs.
Citizen Journalism is going to be the focus of the new neighborbee.
As such, we are improving the site to do the following:
1) Showcase the writers – we will have ”trending” content and feature a “writer of the day.” In addition, writers will have profiles that users can click on that will have more details about them.
2) Geo-tag content – Each post will be tagged to an address. This will enable users to search for content related to an address, zip or block. So a citizen journalist can write about something on their block and it will appear on a map.
3) Enable registered users to contribute – When you become a registered neighborbee user, you will have the ability to post content easily and for free.
4) Users will be able to rate content - The neighborbee community will ultimely determine what content they like and don’t like.
5) Give users in Hives the option to make their content public or private – ‘Hives’ is a neighborbee term for private social networks. neighborbee believes that true citizen journalists are members of their offline communities and will also be members of the neighborbee hives.
The neighborbee community will enable you to find out what’s happening on your block and connect with your neighbors while encouraging you to become a citizen journalist.
Here’s the blog post originally announcing the new site.
Tags:
blogging,
citizen journalism,
new neighborbee
Ouch!
For the past few months we’ve been working hard on developing the new neighborbee. We’re breaking new ground and bending WordPress in a way that’s never been done before, so we’ll most likely be launching the new site in late Spring!
WordPress is the content management system (CMS) while Buddypress is the social networking arm of WordPress. While many people think of WordPress as blogging software, it actually is the underlying language for many websites. neighborbee is using WordPress as part location-based public blog and part social network.
We chose WordPress because:
- neighborbeeblog is built in WordPress and we wanted to migrate all the content seamlessly to the new neighborbee
- WordPress is an open source platform – WordPress likes to say that the system is both free and priceless at the same time
- WordPress is the best when it comes to back end and front end usability
- Flexibility – the core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers and there are thousands of plugins and themes available to expand our functionality
- Buddypress is the open source social network based on the power and flexibility of WordPress
The new neighborbee will enable you to find out what’s happening on your block and connect with your neighbors.
Here are two blog posts announcing the site and talking about our new strategy:
From the hive: there’s going to be a new neighborbee
From the hive: Citizen Journalism
We will be in touch more frequently in anticipation of the big launch!
Tags:
neighborbee,
relaunch,
wordpress
I thought this video about the 911 Memorial was worth sharing.
The memorial will be a scared place where we can celebrate the lives of the people that perished that day and also celebrate the resolve of New York City and the United States.
We will never forget….
