Yesterday I was invited to participate in a presentation/discussion from the folks at Boston.com. They're planning to launch a series of city-specific portals geared to the local communities served by the Boston Globe. Newton will be the first to roll out, and the site is expected to go live sometime next week.
They will not simply appropriate content from other sites; rather, they will provide links to news items (from the Globe, the Herald, the Tab, and elsewhere), blogs, home pages for local business and organizations, municipal information, arts and events calendars, real estate listings, and so on. In that respect, it will be very much like Boston.com itself, just on a local level. But there will be some differences—most notably, a wiki for users to create a database of information on anything and everything that pertains to the city.
The Boston.com folks are still not entirely sure how the blogging part of this site will work. For now they're planning to just link to local blogs that post city-specific content; there's talk of someday having a few people on board who blog specifically for the site. Very interesting indeed.
I met Chuck from the Garden City Blog at the meeting; I recognized him from his tiny avatar photo on Twitter.
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