Google Maps has just made it as easy as can be to embed a map in a Web post. This is a sample map showing the location of several of YoChicago's videos.
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New Homes Magazine and Yo Chicago are now live, in skeletal form. Some of the links work, some are placeholders only.
We’ll be adding tons of flesh to this skeleton in the coming hours, days, weeks and months, but enough is online already for the diligent reader to understand what we’re doing: creating an entirely new form of housing and neighborhood information source.
The search interface for our soon-to-be-renamed highrise guide, with its easy switching between map and grid views, is the identical search interface that will power rentals, for sale properties, news releases, neighborhood information, and much more as we progress.
The New Homes Magazine site, a piece of the new YoChicago site, is on target for a February 1 launch - six months from the day when it was originally scheduled. Click on the link, above, to see the pre-launch version (menu options and many links not yet functional).
It's all coming together very quickly as we near the launch, and we're loading current and archival content on an ongoing basis.
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Have spent a number of 16-hour days immersed in the screen-by-screen details of the soon-to-launch, YoChicago rebranding and rebuilding of NewHomes1.
We're using blogging software (WordPress 2.0) for major pieces of the site, and have been describing those pieces as blogs.
The terminology of blogging, Blogspeak, has been causing me increasing discomfort, in part because of the many ways in which the words fail to resonate with far too many people whose cooperation I need, in part because of the attitudinal problems and warped agendas of far too many denizens of the so-called blogosphere.
So, I'm (mostly) swearing off Blogspeak in public venues, and striking all the references to blogs from the new Web sites.. Wonder how easy it will be to get the staff here to go along with this change?
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If newspapers, as a recent Business Week article contends, are cockroaches, yesterday’s RSS announcements from Microsoft may be the Black Flag for newspapers.
Kills on contact? Not quite, but not far from it.
Microsoft is building RSS aggregation into Longhorn, the next generation of its operating system, and into IE 7 in the meantime. More importantly, it’s making RSS easy to understand and easy to use.
The impact of this on the newspaper business, especially on community and alternative newspapers, will be enormous, and it will be felt fairly soon.
Are newspapers preparing programs to deal with the coming changes? Hell no. Most newspaper people I encounter can’t even spell RSS. Only a very few know what it is, and fewer still have any idea what it means to them.
Business Week compares newspapers to cockroaches based on their ability to survive and prosper through the ages. At the moment, they appear more roach-like in their blindness to the approach of an insecticide.
See more in Tech, Future of newspapers.
