Posted by Erica, 3/16/06 at 7:23:15 PM.
Disclaimer: Please note that all live notes are taken by attendees, and are permanently editable by all blog group members. In note-taking by multiple parties during a running event mistakes of both content and attribution are highly likely. Live Notes are not a reliable source of quotable material; all notes are (sometimes significant) on-the-fly paraphrases by the various note-takers. When possible we attempt to return to the live notes and edit them to greater accuracy, but this is not a guarantee.
Meeting notes are a best effort – comment with or blog your corrections.
Attendees:
MW: Mal Watlington
AH: Ann House
SN: Shava Nerad
BS2: Ben Sheldon
EG: Erica George
j: j
new guy Craig, IBM technologist
RF: randy fenstermacher
Agenda:
reportbacks from various events
Z & M have had to postpone
Manila to WordPress migration
EG describes
j discusses several problems
we discuss relative goodness of wordpress and other blog platforms
geek dinner
real vc blog
http://www.sooz.com/2006/02/02/web-innovators-group-at-the-blue-room/
web innovators group meets monday march 20
http://www.webinnovatorsgroup.com/ – has a wiki w info & rsvp
sconix – social networking for highschool kids
ann asks ben to talk a little about what he’s working on w digital bicycle
digital bicycle is out of ltc in lowell, public access tv. national distribution network. esp useful for the niche communities ie cambodian language.
ben also does mapping stuff, teaching a class for real estate folks
mw: have you done any work on self-defined neighborhoods? rather than using zipcodes, have ppl self-define, and build the community infrastructure around that. it tends to center on people in the neighborhood – leaders – and also sort of geographical “streets the kids can’t cross alone” patterns, etc. some places have very clean, knife-edge breaks
SN: some neighborhoods here are defined by the history of neighbors fighting redevelopment (ie riverside defined by a conflict with Harvard, cambridgeport used to be more coherent, defined by those who fought the inner loop development in 70s. but some now is absorbed into riverside, and some for dana park.)
MW: mapping tools would have made our project that so much faster, we had to do ours in focus groups
craig: citysquares.com
(not mal’s firm, city square consulting)
ann asks craig to talk a little more about his interests
craig: by day, i consult for IBM. i also tho work with ppl on startups, and do digital photography.
more on citysquares (more than squares proper, also neighborhoods)
mostlyu for small businesses
also has civic information
businesses pay for real full listing, but free basic
arts get free listing
good for artist search engine optimization, can link back to their real own website
ah: yeah, it’s hard to find what the neat stuff is when you move to a new neighborhood around here. lots of sites try to provide the service but they’re all still very basic
sn: another thing to do with maps: map all the mini “squares” in cambridge, somerville, that memorialize all those people on random corners. historical walking tour.
citysquares is still v lightly populated.
harvard sq artist carlton soohoo has neat pics
