Urban Jacksonville

I thought today would be a good time to sit back and reflect on what I’m currently up to and into. I feel like Urban Jacksonville is an extension of myself so I’d like to share a slice of where I am personally and philosophically, what projects I’m working on and would like to work on, what what type of blog posts you can look forward to this week.

I just wrapped up a hectic week of preparing for my brother’s wedding and writing an article for EU on the future of digital reading. Congratulations to my brother Jeff and my new sister Brittni. You guys make an awesome pair and I know you’re twice as happy to have the wedding day behind you as I am.

This Week on Urban Jacksonville

This week I’m looking forward to Urban Jacksonville Weekly episode #21 with our guests from JTA, Mike Miller and Scott Clem. We’ll be running a live chat during the show so send in you questions and comments. If you have questions you can email them to urbanjacksonvilleweekly@gmail.com, tweet your question using the hashtag #ujw or leave a question on the Urban Jacksonville Facebook page.

This week I’m planning a post on urban grocery stores to herald the arrival of Springfield’s newest grocery store, Uptown Market. Also, there’s a new project in Phoenix, Arizona called The Daily Pheonix, which I think could be great model for Jacksonville if and when we decide to implement a fixed rail transit system downtown. I’ll be exploring that a bit.

credit: Sean_Marshall

Hopefully at some point this week I’ll be connecting with COJ’s sustainability dude (who knew we had one?) to talk about the new digital parking meters popping up all over downtown.

Finally, I’m working on a new Urban Jacksonville mixtape with Dennis from Thought and Theory. I’d like to have some kind of launch party for the collaboration. It’s going to be a good one. That’s what’s on my radar for now.

New Commenting System Reflection

I’ve been loving the new commenting system, but there are a few bugs I need to fix. Tony pointed out to me that the links in the “Recent Comments” sidebar take you to the page with the comments, but don’t anchor down to the exact comment, which is frustrating him.

I also noticed that the comment count is not appearing correctly the page (see above). I’ll be fixing those two things and working on the visual appearance of the comments. I think the comments seem a bit clunky so I’ll be working on fine tuning that. What do you think?

What I’m Up To

Whew. Have you ever wanted to do a thousand things at once? I’ve been so motivated by technology lately. It’s such an exciting time to be alive. I’m going to spend some time working on my personal site. Adding articles I’ve written and pulling in various content I produce around the web. I’m currently weighing the value of using something like Posterous which is intriguing, or just updating the site on my own.

How journalists are innovating has been very high on my radar lately. I’ve been following lots of blogs in this space trying to figure out what’s next for Urban Jacksonville. I’m also looking into moving Urban Jacksonville Weekly to Blip.tv and/or Blog Talk Radio. Updating and posting has become cumbersome and inconsistent. Finding a way to streamline the process and improve the between recording and posting is essential.

Finally, I’ve been listening to a couple new podcasts I’d like to share:

JournalismNow
Covers multimedia, data and social aspects of modern news. The Journalism Now Podcast is created through a partnership of the University of Florida’s College of Journalism and Communications, The Poynter Institute, and participants from various news agencies. The most recent episode discusses The Daily Phoenix project which I talked about above.

CUNY Lecture Series
Lectures from City University in New York on various topics including The CUNY Sustainability Project and PlaNYC, Beyond Bike Lanes: Retrofitting the 21st Century Metropolis for Bicycles and Pedestrians, Times Square, Respectable Again and One Cure for the Health Care Crisis.

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 7:35 am and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.