Twitter and OurTown!

Listeners of the World,

Over the past few months we have been expanding our social media presence with developing our OurTown facebook account, twitter account, linkedin page, and our blog. We also have been encouraging people to Digg the more popular stories on OurTown. Everything has seemed to be taking off except for our twitter account. We need more followers and we need your help. I want to expand our followers by 100% over the next few weeks. Unlike most sites who have multiple social media accounts, we run different news, stories, and material on the different accounts we run! So by only being a part of our facebook, blog and/or linkedin you are missing out on a lot of great stories and important news pertaining to OurTown. So help us help everyone by connecting them with our twitter account.

Your OurTown Superhero,

Chris

Simple is the best way!

Listeners of the World,

We have been doing a lot of research and testing over the past few months to help in our re-design of OurTown.com. We have talked with people, studied competitors sites and studied how people in general use the Internet. We have found that "simple" is the key ingredient for success!

We have found that the less steps it takes to input data, the more people will want to participate with the site. That is why we are cutting down steps on the contribution of all forms of media. On the new site you will have one place to go to input stories, photos, videos, events, and PDFs. Once you decide what type of media you are contributing you will only have a one step process. You will just enter in what media it is that you wish to submit to the editor and simply click OK. Our system will take care of the rest!

We have also found the the less time it takes for our viewers to find what they are looking for, the more likely it is for them to come back! We have taken our site and added simple icons for the different types of media you would like to view and paired it with a list of categories and search. Now I know most of you are saying 'well yea that is how its suppose to be",but many sites make it more complicated to find exactly what you are looking for. Example: You are a student looking for a picture of a building burned down in a little neighborhood. You simply go to the neighborhood and click on the photos tab. Once within this tab you can either search the categories for buildings or you can do a search on that building. Most sites will give you many different forms of media on this story and maybe not a picture, where a picture is the only type of media that you would receive from our site.

These are two very vague design elements that are going into the production of our new site. We are going simple where it seems everyone else is going complex!

Your OurTown SuperHero,

Chris

Cloud Hosting

Listeners of the World,

You might have heard about Cloud Hosting in the news lately. But what is Cloud Hosting? And how will it affect Ourtown?

You might not know it but you probably already take part in Cloud hosting if you are using Google. Google has a huge infrastructure of computers, a cloud, that handle all the searches people do.

So what is Cloud Hosting? Cloud Hosting a large set of computers that all handle requests from clients, that's you, in real time. This is much better than having a single server because it scalable allowing more power to be added to the system as needed. For Ourtown, this means that if we need more power we just add more servers to the Cloud. It also means if a server goes down there are others to take its place, reducing down time. Taking it one step further, this Cloud of servers can be distributed all over the world with multiple backups so if there is a major disaster at one data center another is able to take up the load.

So despite some of the bad press Cloud Hosting has received lately, done right Cloud is very beneficial to Ourtown.

Your tech wizard,
Michael

Black History Month

Listeners of the World,

The month of February is dedicated to celebrating heroes, accomplishments, and the everyday man! It is a month to take time out and look back at what the African American population went through and how they have risen above all the challenges and hardships to become who they are today........ incredible people! Now before you can look back you need to look at people today and a lot of people take too many things for granite and don't appreciate what others have done before them. This is a problem and I think that having a Black History Month helps with making people take a step back and actually learn about the history of what they went through. There are so many heroes and leaders that need to be recognized and too many key events that there are too many to list! This is the month to help people forget about their differences and to embrace everyone as their equal.....because we are in fact all equal and have always been equals. During this month I will post varies stories of certain triumphs in the African American community to honor their heroes and to educate people who are still in the dark!

Your OurTown SuperHero,

Chris