Two Announcements
Two quick announcements as we start out a new week...
First, my company has finally relaunched its website. We got rid of the Flash, added lots of content and made all of our research available for you to download directly from our site. While I like Flash for very specific projects - media players, stand-alone timelines, overlays for data-driven applications - I really don't like entire websites that launch as a single .swf file. There are too many barriers for folks on older machines, who don't understand what Flash is (or that they need a Flash player) or who simply don't want to launch the application. Call us retro, but we've decided on basic HTML.
Second, I've decided to help out a friend and veteran journalist Dan Rottenberg on his site, the Broad Street Review. For me, this is an exciting side project - I'm going to help Dan with the site, which is dedicated to arts and culture reporting around the greater Philadelphia area. What I like about BSR is that it's nearly 100% community-driven...but through a unique editing and publishing process, the content is vetted just as rigorously as it would be at, say, the Philadelphia Inquirer or Daily News. While the interactivity may not currently suggest it, BSR is very Web 2.0. It's a dialogue, not at all a monologue. The entire site is conversational - you'll find third and fourth stories on a particular opera performance, and they fold in the comments and thoughts from other writers and readers. Readers very much dictate the stories and arts coverage - and they're encouraged to participate using text, photos, audio and more. BSR may currently lack some of the bells and whistles of other sites, but I don't know of anyone else who's doing this much back-and-forth journalism with their audience.
