Vox Media’s new gaming site, Polygon, (originally known as Vox Games) launched earlier this week. The new sister site to SB Nation and The Verge has a cool Philly tie.
Polygon Editor in Chief Chris Grant is a Fishtown resident. The former Joystiq editor, with whom we’ve profiled, wrote an introduction to the new gaming site here.
The competitive real estate and built environment news community of Philadelphia has a new player.
Curbed.com, the New York City based blog network, which also has regional versions in nine other markets, today launches Philly.Curbed.com. The local site will be edited by Liz Spikol, the former Philadelphia Weekly columnist and editor of the now defunct Hispanic tech magazine Tek Lado.
“Curbed marries an obsession with real estate and neighborhoods with wit and entertainment,” said Spikol. “It’s fun.”
Evan Kalish
For much of its 220 year history, the U.S. Postal Service was something of a technology company: speeding communication and commerce through innovation, says postal geek Evan Kalish.
Today, in batch machines that can process 40,000 pieces of mail per hour, some 95 percent of handwritten addresses are properly dispatched by OCR technology, the 25 year old student in Penn’s master of urban spatial analytics program.
“[The machines work] from the ZIP code first, then to the address and select the proper street from the limited number of options available, tagging them with the bar codes that you can see on the bottom of first-class letters you receive. Human operators resolve the rest of the addresses remotely,” said Kalish, who lives in University City. “With Delivery Point Sequencing, another machine properly sort the mail for dozens of carriers in proper delivery order, based on their routes, with just two passes of the mail through the system.”
From today to the first ‘fully automated post office‘ back to the pneumatic mail tubes of the past, Kalish, a native of Queens, N.Y., has discovered new corners of the world’s original modern national postal system while writing his popular Going Postal blog, which has been profiled by Time magazine, the Washington Post, BBC and NPR.
All the stories use young Kalish as something of a juxtaposition for growing news of inevitable cutbacks at the U.S. Postal Service. While no doubt an important issue to Kalish, he says the best he can do is grow interest in what remains an impressive organization.
If nothing else, a hastily launched blog can speak to a moment in time.
This weekend, local street artist devotee Conrad Benner launched Nutterbook, which highlights the more memorable comments on Mayor Michael Nutter’s Facebook page. Simple enough that it might be confused with the inane, instead, Nutterbook is a fun way to follow a communication tool still in its infancy, said Benner, 26, who also runs StreetsDept.com, dubbed the ‘Huffington Post of Philly street art‘ and made famous for following a subway ‘yarn-bombing.’
Visit Nutterbook here.
After announcing a three-city expansion in September, Old City-based TheDrinkNation.com and its related mobile app have launched a slew of new features, including a pitch for event submissions, in an effort to grow a robust events listings calendar.
See a blog post from the nightlife news site here and the press release here.
The local outpost of the Occupy movement, the wide-ranging, peaceful uprising turned tent city, has made fine use of the social web for connecting groups around the world. Most viscerally though, the weeks-long demonstration is captured by a sea of people and their signs — messages inscribed for a soundless moment.
Michael Bixler is seeking to bring those local moments back to the web, by way of his straight forward Tumblr 99 Faces, 99 Signs.
The Point Breeze freelance writer, photographer and videographer was motivated to capture Occupy Philly after he and his girlfriend visited the Wall Street demonstrations on their seventh day.
Now it’s gone much further than he had planned.
From Tumblr user anacrisi, and referenced on This is Not a Cheesesteak.
Cheesesteaks don’t have to be just another cliche we’re saddled with, says Michaelangelo Ilagan.
The SAP web designer and Geekadelphia contributor is embracing the 80-year-old native hoagie variation by chronicling how far, wide and wrongly it has spread. Meet This is Not a Cheesesteak, a Tumblr that Ilagan is curating to collect new takes on the steak sandwich standard that he considers an insult to our roots.
“Unlike Rocky, we’re not revering something fictional. @visitphilly called it ‘Cheesesteak Pride’ when they tweeted a link to my Tumblr,” said Ilagan, 27, who goes by Mikey Il. “Let’s make that a thing. The cheesesteak is 100 percent real and absolutely delicious when done right.”
PlanPhilly, the built environment news site, has launched Eyes on the Street, a blog to serve as an extension of its coverage and aimed at offering shorter and more accessible coverage for casual readers.
Visit the blog at EyesOnTheStreet.com. Read the PlanPhilly announcement here.
PlanPhilly, funded largely by the William Penn Foundation and housed at the University of Pennsylvania’s civic action outpost PennPraxis, was launched in 2006 by former Inquirer Jersey editor Matt Golas, who has reigned since then as the site’s managing editor, and then PennPraxis staff Harris Steinberg and Michael Greenle.
Hidden City Philadelphia, the festival celebrating “remarkable but obscured” heritage sites, has launched a daily news site dedicated to coverage of historical preservation in the region.
Hidden City Daily will feature content covering the developed world and architecture in Philadelphia. To launch, the site will have some two dozen contributors. It soft launched Friday.
VISIT THE SITE HERE.
Hidden City was a celebrated summer 2009 urban exploration art showcase, hosting fitting installations inside otherwise forgotten developed wonders, like Girard College’s Founders Hall or the Metropolitan Opera House. The second version of the festival is scheduled for 2013.
The initial festival was funded by the Knight Foundation and conceived by Thaddeus Squire, with whom Technically Philly spoke in June. Squire, aiming to stabilize and strengthen Hidden City, now a client of his CultureWorks program, said he hopes to build a community leading up to the next festival.
In a unique step forward for a nonprofit’s web presence, the editorial team playing the dominant site role. It’s a flip of the model. Think: instead of a news site like Technically Philly launching events, this is an event series launching a news site.
The site will work with the festival to bring in memberships and some advertising to fund the work.
TheDrinkNation.com will launch “in the next two to three weeks if all goes well”, beginning the national expansion plans of DrinkPhilly.com, says founder Adam Schmidt.
“That will serve as a nation-wide content site and parent site for all the cities we are in. The nationwide content will be aimed at being general enough that anyone could enjoy it and will help populate the content to the local city sites and those local sites will also have freelancers contributing local content. So the city sites will have a combination of local and nationwide content, as well as all the happy hour data like what we have for Philly,” Schmidt, 29, tells Technically Philly. “I think it will be a pretty new type of media model in this industry.”
The online bar guide and nightlife news site launched in 2009 as an expansion on Schmidt’s Excel spreadsheet of Philadelphia Happy Hours. Technically Philly has spotted splash pages for DrinkDC, DrinkBaltimore and DrinkNYC.
“We’re looking at launching DrinkBaltimore and DrinkDC in early-mid October. No firm dates yet as we are still working to organize the launch parties. DrinkNYC is a ways away yet, probably in the spring or later,” he said.
In May, Schmidt announced the site’s launch to the Jersey Shore. New DrinkPhilly Editor Danya Henninger, who replaced outgoing edit lead Justin Giza, will lead the DrinkNation editorial operation, she told Technically Philly.
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