Next American City, the nine-year-old Brewerytown-based urban policy journal, is launching its redesigned web site today in honor of its move to all online content.

Visit the new site here.

Not only is it a redesign, it’s also an experiment in selling national content.

The redesign is launching alongside the birth of Next American City’s Forefront, a new online weekly journal that will feature a new piece of long-form urban journalism every Monday. Each piece can be purchased individually ($1.99) or a reader can purchase an all-you-can-eat, 12-monrg digital subscription ($17.88).

The web site will serve as a national aggregator of urban journalism that will be available for free through partnerships with 100 urbanist journalism outlets across the country, according to a press release.

Next American City stopped publishing in print in the summer of 2011. The publication is edited by Diana Lind.

To celebrate the launch of Forefront and the site redesign, Next American City will be hosting a Tactical Urbanism Salon at its storefront headquarters on Girard Ave.

From the release:

“In Philadelphia, Next American City will present the all-day interactive Tactical Urbanism Salon in collaboration with The Street Plans Collaborative on Saturday, April 28 from 1:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. at its new home, the Storefront for Urban Innovation (2816 W Girard Ave). The event considers how short-term action can lead to long-term change in cities and invites urban interventionists to share projects and ideas that apply creativity, sustainability, technology, and social good.”

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.

Polygon will live at The Verge for a little while longer, according to Grant’s introduction.

The Polygon team created and introductory video to the new brand which offers a little insight into what you might expect — but don’t get too excited, we’re pretty sure that Grant’s interview wasn’t done in Fishtown.

Maurice Gaston, at left, is director of photography for a documentary on the Philadelphia technology community, and David Dylan Thomas, at right, is its director. Photo by Matthew Albasi.

Philadelphia’s tech scene is getting its own debut.

It’s lights, camera, action for producers David Dylan Thomas and Maurice Gaston’s newest project about the quickly evolving technology market in Philadelphia. The duo, who are both independent documentarians, are digging for secrets of the market, leaders in creative technology and fascinating technological innovations in the city for a still unnamed, web-based documentary project.

The web series is scheduled to be completed this fall, with a trailer aimed for release during Philly Tech Week in April, says Thomas.

Thomas became interested with the dramatic growth in the Philadelphia tech scene.

“I became really fascinated with ‘how did that happen’ and ‘how did that happen here in Philly” which, when I first got here, had no tech scene to speak of,” said Thomas, who moved from Baltimore in 2004 and now lives in Media.

Below, a short video interview with the documentarians.

Throughout their filming process, Thomas, 38, and Maurice, 47, have found a trend in the use of co-working spaces. Places such as Indy Hall provide space for new ideas and innovative technology, where freelance professionals bring themselves together.

“There’s been a huge component of social responsibility in the tech community, in that, people want to be involved in making their world better,” said Gaston, who grew up and lives in Mount Airy.

Because it provides the space and the brains for most of the tech community, events planned by groups such as PANMA and BarCamp start in the heart of Indy Hall. Thomas and Gaston hope to follow this trend in one portion of their documentary.

Maurice Gaston interviewing littleberlin co-director Kelani Nichole at Indy Hall.

When a small community looks at itself, there’s sure to be criticism, but, in large part, many see the exercise as an important one.

The pair behind this one met at the first Barcamp Philly in 2008, though their relationship grew up following the unconference’s third iteration in 2010. Thomas had the idea following SXSW in March 2011, talked to Gaston that summer and by this January, they began filming.

The documentary itself is presented in an interesting format. Instead of spending copious amounts of time on one long-form piece that will be outdated by the time of its release, Thomas and Gaston will be producing their documentary for the web, sectioned off into ten-minute segments, five segments per season. This allows the documentary to flow with the changing times.

Watch clips from some of their interviews here, including one on this site’s founding.

“This affords us the opportunity to create something and while we’re creating it continue to hone the relevance of it,” Gaston said.

Thomas and Gaston both have vast backgrounds in tech work. Thomas served as online Editor-and-Chief at Consumer Technology Publishing Group from 2006 to 2010 where he worked in web strategy, online trends and SEO projects. A graduate from Johns Hopkins University in 1995, Thomas has expertise in video, podcasts and online blogs as well as a vast knowledge of documentarian-style work. He now works for the Templeton Foundation.

Gaston, a graduate of Drexel University, is a web developer at Comcast Interactive Media. His professional experience includes multimedia development and consulting, software engineering and human factors.

Thomas and Gaston hope to finish their unnamed documentary for the fall of 2012.

Below, watch an example of the documentary’s stlye, in a clip from their interview with P’unk Ave founder Geoff Di Masi.

This is a report done in partnership with Temple University’s Philadelphia Neighborhoods program, the capstone class for the Temple’s Department of Journalism.

The new product, Pre-Roll Insurance, launched earlier this week and it seems like it will make advertisers happy no matter what viewers do.

Based on the CAPTCHA TYPE-IN advertising product which helped put Solve Media on the map from its launch in September 2010, the pre-roll video advertising feature replaces the usual “skip ad” button that shows up a few seconds into a video internet ad with a text box. To ditch the ad and get to the content, the user has to type the company’s slogan into the text box. The advertiser feels as though he got his money’s worth because a potential customer engaged with his branding message. The internet user, however, has to decide whether to sit through an entire advertisement or type in a potentially irritating slogan.

Either way, Solve Media says in its promotional video that it’s hit on a product that addresses two major advertising concerns. First, 70 percent of YouTube users, on average, opt to “skip ad,” according to the press release. Second, even when users don’t skip, they usually multitask instead of watching the commercial.

Max Sobol, executive vice president of Solve Media, told Technically Philly that Pre-Roll Insurance addresses those concerns in two ways:

1. Promotes user choice and saves users a bunch of time (smart ad skipping)
2. Improves pre-roll advertising effectiveness & impact for advertisers (super memorable)

Solve Media learned the power of perception early on when it dropped its original name, AdCopy, because people assumed they were a copywriting outfit. It’s also not the first time they’ve drawn mixed reviews for so adeptly facilitating the interests of advertisers, as Technically Philly reported.

Solve Media is based in Center City on South Broad, though it also has offices in New York and Chicago. The company is backed by First Round Capital, New Atlantic Ventures, AOL Ventures, Bullpen Capital and a few angel investors, according to the press release.

The company is up to 35 people in total, 20 of whom are in Center City, says Sobol, “handling tech, ad ops and publisher business development.” Satellite offices in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles are all handling ad sales, he said.

Business Insider speculated as to whether the new Pre-Roll Insurance was “creepy.”

We guess it’s up to the online viewer to decide.

Just about now, Coworking Weekly, a newsletter that promises to aggregate interesting and relevant coworking news from around the globe, is landing in the inboxes of some 700 people.

It’s being curated by Alex Hillman, cofounder of Indy Hall, in a small move aimed at further cementing he and Indy Hall among the vanguard of the international movement he largely leads locally — and has used to build a consulting practice. To sign up for Coworking Weekly, which pledges a delivery Thursday mornings at 9am, click here.

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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.”

The site was launched in Manhattan in May 2004 by writer and sometimes entrepreneur Lockhart Steele, who has since built a small empire of focused niche sites beyond the Curbed network, which also has local versions in Boston, Washington D.C., Detroit, Atlanta, Chicago, Los Angeles, Seattle, San Francisco and the Hamptons.

The display advertising model will be tested, following the path of the short-lived Philadelphia expansion of Brooklyn-based real estate blog Brownstoner. Since then, the niche has been attacked locally by Naked Philly and Plan Philly’s Eyes on the Street, in addition to historically-focused Hidden City and others.

[Full Disclosure: PlanPhilly has retained Technically Media, this news site's parent company, for web strategy work in the past.]

It’s a place that Spikol says Curbed can distinguish itself with her local leadership, noting her “thorough knowledge of the city and its quirks.”

“People should come to the site if they have a sense of humor and if the following things make their hearts pound faster: castles in Mt. Airy; Frank Furness; confusing neighborhood renamings; community forum threads; mysterious new construction; urban ruins; street art; the fate of the Reading Viaduct; historical architecture; catchment issues; remarkable houses and apartments; hideous interior design; economic development; urban planning; sexy floorplans; Ed Bacon’s interest in skateboarding—and so much more,” Spikol wrote Technically Philly in an email. “I look forward to Philly readers helping us define the site.”

Below, watch Curbed.com founder Lockhart Steel talk real estate blogging.

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.

The blog kicked off in September 2010 as a way to share photos and stories about the postal service with other devotees of the historic agency, says Kalish, who did his undergrad work at Brown University.

The first effort followed a cross-country road trip but has grown from there.

“My newer entries have also been more in-depth, and shares the broader experience and anecdotes of rolling into any given town, as opposed to just showing a photograph of its post office.  I think it’s more relatable and I’ve gotten positive feedback with respect to my unique telling of my postal visits,” he said.

While his post office trekking has taken him across the country, it has also helped him get to know Philadelphia better, by visiting 45 21 offices in the city’s neighborhoods.

“There were three post offices that I had to visit because I knew they were likely to close: the Adams Avenue, Girard Avenue, and Wissonoming stations.  Those were all discontinued April this year,” he said. “Two offices I’ve enjoyed a lot in Philadelphia are Spring Garden on North 7th Street and Southwark at 925 Dickinson. Both are historic buildings constructed during the 1930s as part of Roosevelt’s WPA program, and each features a great interior mural. This is how the government kept artists working during the Depression.”

Kalish lobbied the Postal Service to donate a unique sign from the Wissinoming office to the Post Mark Collectors Club museum in Bellevue Museum and adds that Manayunk’s is unique for featuring a street level parking garage beneath the post office.

I have never seen that before or since,” he said, but, of course, being in Philadelphia, it’s hard to top the B. Free Franklin Post Office in Old City that was the nation’s first.

“Overall, my favorite post office, at least in terms of architecture, is that of Greenville, PA.  Its sheer grandeur, combined with unique materials and fantastic architectural details, make it a true standout,” Kalish says. “It’s tough to pick a general favorite since I’m fortunate to have had great postal experiences all across the country.”

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.

“Mr. Nutter is, I believe, the first sitting [Philadelphia] mayor to have a Facebook page, and it’s fun to watch this new forum for democracy take its baby steps,” said Benner, who works as a social media manger for a local ad agency. “I’m sure this is not what the Mayor of Philadelphia’s Facebook page will look like in 15 years, if there even is still a Facebook.”

From non sequiturs like a professed Nutter family member leaving his phone number and asking for a call back to the outrageous and downright spammy, Benner, who says he has been commenting himself on Nutter’s Facebook page for months, says that while many of the less constructive comments appear to be the norm of higher-volume, potentially partisan web traffic, there might be a lesson for the mayor’s communications staff.

“I think it might be interesting for the mayor, or his people, to interact with some of these more serious commenters however,” said Benner, a Fishtown native who attended the Community College of Philadelphia for a few semesters before pursuing other interests. “Right now Mr. Nutter seems to be using the platform to broadcast news and information, but it would be interesting, and potentially very benificial for him, to interact with the commenters. They are, after all, citizens of Philadelphia and potential voters. Perhaps he should see this as a modern day public forum.”

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.

Four NBC affiliates will partner with nonprofit news organizations in those markets, as the New York Times reports, in another initiative Comcast brass pledged to the FCC in the cable operator’s takeover of the storied entertainment brand.

Locally, NBC 10 will partner with WHYY, the region’s Old City based public media outfit.

In January, the planned project to bolster local news was first heralded as a noteworthy tradeoff for the consoidation of two large content and delivery companies. The model was due to follow an existing partnership in San Diego between voiceofsandiego.org and KNSD, which, as Poynter reported, “cooperate to produce regular fact-checking segments, explainers on public policy and other features.”

The details of the partnership between WHYY and NBC 10 have not been made fully clear.

In July, NBC 10 put out a request for proposals to partner with nonprofit news organizations in the region.