Lincolnite

What is Lincolnite? A community that will fill you in on the happenings in this fine city. 
A begin the day link to catch up.
Finds the interesting stuff in the LJS that is important to the citys well being.
A place that provides many means for user submitted content, even though few utilize it.
Not filled with adverts, kudos.

What should it be?  What could it be?  I guess we will see.

Who should it serve, and how should it serve them?  Lincolnites can get some good info and discussion here, I like the main goal of the site.  If you try to do too much it just becomes a cluster#$%@ of junk like my site.

Let’s see…

I’ll start by saying how I use the Lincolnite as it stands today - as a filter. 80% of what is in the LJS is either not local news or it is not relevant to me. I don’t want to be the blog patrol. I come to Lincolnite first because it summarizes what SHOULD be important to me as a Lincoln resident - or at least on my radar. Whether it is from LJS, blogs, or otherwise.

Things I L-O-V-E about the Lincolnite:

- The commenters are thoughtful and appropriate, whether I agree with them or not. The commenters also seem to be “regulars.” I refuse to enter the fray of lowest common denominator comments at the LJS.

- RSS feed! Yea!

- There is little/no Husker coverage unless it impacts the community. I appreciate that you leave this topic to the plethora of other sites dedicated to it. Sports coverage, like religion & politics & operating systems gets far too passionate and encourages people to get out of line in their comments.

- Political coverage is neutral. Maybe I don’t pay close enough attention, but I have no idea whether the contributors here are Republican or Democrat or otherwise.

- The layout is minimal. I wish more sites would learn from this. I have no interest in seeing every bell-whistle known to man on one page. White space is your friend, not your enemy. I feel calm when I am here.

- For the most part, even though we all complain about stuff and people have strong opinions from time to time, it is one of the most positive environments I see on a daily basis. I’ll keep coming as long as that holds out!

Things I have noticed about the Lincolnite:

- I get a LOT of my local news from here, but whenevever I bring it up in “real life” no one has ever once heard of it. How might you increase your exposure on a shoestring budget? That is a good question.

- I have found the restaurant experiences and advice offered here to be very accurate. I believe you have attempted a food specific area in the past, but perhaps there is interest in breathing life in it again? Or at least implementing some tagging mechanism so that i could click on “Food” and see all the posts relating to that.

- It seems to me that the bulk of the content on the Lincolnite is referring to original content on other sites like LJS or blogs. That’s fine - i rely on it as a filter as I stated earlier. However, contributors and commenters here seem to have a lot to offer. Perhaps you could create some original content of your own? Interviews with local artists, politicians, musicians, entrepreneurs, chefs, interesting characters?

- I appreciate the lack of advertising on the site, but maybe you could do something where you contacted local businesses and offered they eyeballs for coupon-codes or something? The visitors get discounts, the propriotors get eyeballs and foot-traffic, you get increased traffic to the site. Win-win-win.

- Something I have seen occasionally around the net that is interesting to me is when a site owner sees an interesting comment posted on an article and contacts the poster to see if they would be interested in developing that into a guest-post. I believe that while not everyone is cut out to be a “blogger”, everyone has one or two tremendous posts inside of them whether they know it or not. A skillful moderator might be able to see it hiding in the comments and preen it out of them.

- I was impressed by the organization around the petition letter to the LJS web site around RSS feeds a while ago. Perhaps there are more local impact topics that this community would rally behind for open petitions?

- As someone who moved here only a few years ago, I am interested in picking up the local history. Features on Lincoln neighborhoods (both historical and current) would be appreciated.

That’s quite enough out of me. I’ll pipe down now.

Thank you for everything the Lincolnite is today. I look forward to what it might become.

First off I wanted to thank you for all your work on the Lincolnite.

I absolutely agree with everything posted above and would like to add the main thing I see missing on the Lincolnite is use of the Forum (to tell you the truth I didn

Some brief responses:

Bork:

If you try to do too much it just becomes a cluster#$%@ of junk like my site.

But I like your junk 😉

CP:

The commenters are thoughtful and appropriate, whether I agree with them or not.

Agreed. I love reading the comments from you folks.

How might you increase your exposure on a shoestring budget?

That’s a good question. I have a couple ideas that I think could generate a fair amount of buzz. I won’t explain too much, but I will say that I have found that feeding the stomach and exercising the mind are great ways to get attention. I’m open to any ideas y’all might have.

Perhaps you could create some original content of your own? Interviews with local artists, politicians, musicians, entrepreneurs, chefs, interesting characters?

Definitely. And the products shouldn’t just be written-word. (There I go dropping another hint.)

Features on Lincoln neighborhoods (both historical and current) would be appreciated.

I am interested in that sort of thing as well.

Wisco:

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Good posts and I agree with them.

I use Lincolnite for information and discussion about Lincoln news and topics. And I like that the discussion keeps a civil tone.

The forums have a lot of potential and I assume traffic will increase there when more attention is given to it.

I like the idea of classifieds and it might be a good place to find things to sell and buy. I don’t do a lot of that, however, so it’s not a big issue for me.

I miss the Lincoln food blogs that I used to frequent (“Eatin’ in Lincoln” and “Portly Chef”). I’d be interested in seeing something happening there.

I’d also be willing to share some of my photos, not that I shoot a ton.  Flickr has some nice Lincoln communities but it might be fun to have a place to park some Lincoln photos and discuss.

You may have figured out that I feel like a “regular” at Lincolnite. It’s one of my must-stops daily (usually more than once). I have the blogs page bookmarked - otherwise, it’s likely I would have hit it and maybe not come back, seeing that the maing thing at the top of page one is a review of Blue Orchid from January 2006.

I love the blog and the comments. I’d love to see more of the same - particulary my faves are the issues of new businesses and restaurants and just the hit/miss side of doing business in Lincoln. More restaurant views would be fun.

Also, until just now, I never knew there were active forums. My suggestion would be to be similar to the eomaha forums - news about coming business, restaurants, rumors, etc. Often, posters include photos of what’s coming and going.

Did I mention that I love the comments?

Although it is startling to learn that Mr. Wilson loves Bork’s junk. That could be TMI, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

I think the format of the site is great, it’s just that the information in most areas has never been populated to keep up with the list of links at the bottom of the page. I keep, in my browser, a shortcut of local links so if I need to verify hours of operation, etc. to places like Douglas Theatres, the library, Children’s Museum, Zoo, etc., I can get there. That’s not a bad idea either for this type of site.

All in all, I love the work and I love the feel and I love making comments. It’s often made me consider starting my own blog, life’s just been in the way too much this year. Kudos to Mr. W and the crew!

You asked for it, huh?

1. Fresh content on main page- that probably means the blog goes up front. That’s not a bad thing. Maybe you could categorize blog posts so certain ones go up front and others stay on the blog page.

2. Guest posters - don’t get me wrong. I *love* your posts - but this often feels like more of a personal blog than how I *think* you intend it, a community gathering place.

3. No image map navigation - I think that’s how you’re doing the links at the top. When I surf with my page colors off, they go away.

4. Integrate with Flickr. The Flickr Lincoln group is thriving, and it would be great to see some cross activity (I know there’s already some) There are lots of easy ways to pull in Flickr photos, the least of which is just displaying the RSS feed.

5.An events calender in iCal format- so I can add to Google or other calendaring program. -OR- Use upcoming.org for calendaring. Basically, let it integrate with other services. I don’t know if there’s already one place where Lincoln events are well represented- if there is, use that.

6. Combined forums - I know I’ve said if before, but here it is again. At the least, I think “Living in Lincoln” “The Podium” “Rumor Mill” and “Visiting Lincoln” can be combined. “Sports Talk,” “Potpourri,” and “Nebraska” might also be included. My thoughts on this is that we’re a community of people living in Lincoln, and we might have similar interests- give people a place to find out! If we all separate into our own forums for different topics, we won’t get to know each other. It’s not that hard to scan forum topics and see if there’s anything you’re interested in- if one topic gets especially unwieldy, you can consider moving it out later.

I also think a separate forum for “Story suggestions” would be nice.

7. Drop classifieds and link to Craigslist. Too many free classifieds services are more hinder than help.

8. The blog roll is nice, but it would also be nice if there was a place where posters could post a short bio and a link to their own website and what it is about. I suppose this could easily be handled by the edit profile feature- it would be nice if you could click on someone’s name and get to their profile when they commented in the blog, and it would be nice to have a list of profiles somewhere (there may already be, I just don’t know where it is.) Bringing this info front and center may encourage people to fill out their profile info.

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Basically, rather than recreating everything on this site, I think it would be really nice if Lincolnite was a place where you know you can find the best content, whether it was created here or not. As someone else said, I use Lincolnite mainly as a filter. I like Fletch’s idea of a comprehensive Lincoln Link List - to my knowledge, there is nothing of the sort for Lincoln. Making it easy for people to add and find new resources would be key.

You’ve probably already considered most of this, but I thought I’d throw stuff out there. Whew! That was longer than I thought!

Thanks for the feedback, Karin. I’ll just briefly respond to a few items (I don’t want to take over the comments)—

2. Definitely. Hence the e-mail exchange we’re having right now 😊

3. It’s not an image map, but point taken.

4. I need to look into this.

8. Definitely.

Karin’s thoughts are great!

funny I was just helping do some flickr stuff for a freinds site this morning.

make a cooler flickr badge here

I know that what appears in the newspaper and what people are actually talking about are not necessarily one in the same. I like Lincolnite not as a filter to what’s in the paper, but as a supplement to what’s reported. A reporter can get only so many sources, so Lincolnite is kind of like the cast and crew commentary on a DVD.

I don’t go to the main page anymore because of that apparently permanent Blue Orchid review…I just use the firefox live bookmarks to get the latest blog posts. I would say if anything needs an overhaul, it’s definitely the front page.