TNT: Historical Society’s interactive PhilaPlace Web site needs your stories

The Keystone Sewing Machine company, based at Second and Poplar in Northern Liberties, is located in a building that was once a dance hall built in the late 1800s.

Frankford Avenue’s Bike Stable was built in 1890 to house horses, once sharing a wall with a Kensington police station on neighboring Front St., before Kensington was a part of the city.

These stories, along with more than 150 others, are being shared with accompaniments of video, audio, images and scans of historical documents at PhilaPlace, a new site designed by the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, a three-year project that launched last week.

“[We focus on] neighborhoods ‘beyond the bell,’ beyond the revolutionary history. The history of neighborhoods of people who built this city, who make Philadelphia, Philadelphia,” project coordinator Melissa Mandell says.

PhilaPlace had very different beginnings, after a modest grant from Pew’s Heriage Philadelphia program helped the Historical Society package together two trolley tours in South Philadelphia and Northern Liberties.

It was a mandate to talk about 19th century ethnic and immigrant working-class history, Mandell says. “Not being in the trolley tour business,” HSP decided on focusing on a virtual environment as it moved forward.

And the project got bigger—much so.

Read more

TNT: The state of hyperlocal online news in Philadelphia

Updated: 8/31/09 6:17 p.m., source title

Sarah Lockard should take more walks.

Earlier this summer, the Wayne native was on a long stroll when she decided she should contact Internet craft supply marketplace Etsy about working with AroundMainLine.com, the online magazine startup she launched last fall to cover the famed, ritzy swath of Philadelphia suburbs.

It was on another walk — one amid the crowds of last September spring’s blue-blooded Devon Horse Show — that the former B2B magazine sales executive decided the Main Line needed community coverage online.

Sarah Lockard

Both “epiphanies,” as Lockard called them, seem to have worked out just fine. AroundMainLine.com has partnered with Etsy to profile artisan goods from regional crafts-makers and, while she declined to disclose monthly revenue or funding, her online magazine features weekly content, has a Web designer on staff, photographers on call and a sidebar etched with advertising.

Lockard, 34, boasts that hers was the first for-profit online magazine in the Philadelphia region. But she won’t be the last.

The hyperlocal Web outfit — tied by geography, focused on a niche community and online-only — is meant to be a great wave of the future, seen by MSNBC’s recent purchase of crime and news aggregator EveryBlock, partnerships with online news startups and product launches like Outside.In and Patch.com.

Philadelphia has its first wave of adopters, but their sustainability is far less certain.

Read more

21st century Abraham Lincoln iPhone app and Web site

Updated 5/7/09 10:43 a.m.

The allure of Abraham Lincoln, graffitied brightly with wispy hair on a wall in Houston is startling.

The 16th president was born more than 200 years ago, but he continues to take new 21st century forms.

The Rosenbach Museum and Library has launched an Abraham Lincoln iPhone and iPod Touch application as part of its 21st-century Abe project, according to a press release from the half-century year-old historical organization in Rittenhouse.

The app is said to be the first by a Philadelphia cultural group.

The “Bobble Abe” app, which is available for free in the iTunes store, personifies old Abe as a bobble head that can be shook by users, along with humorous Lincoln aphorisms as recorded by Northern Liberties comedy theater company 1812 Productions, with actor Nathan Holt as the voice of Abe.

Read more

Shop Talk: Philadelphia Weekly redesign with Keith McGinnis of Review Publishing

Update amended: 8:50 p.m. 4/19/09

From time to time in the recent past, one of the most trafficked Web sites in Philadelphia has gotten a major redesign.

Unfortunately, there was never one source that covered the whys and the hows. Now there is: Technically Philly.

So, here’s the first in an irregular series of our Shop Talk department, called The Redesign.

Both of Philadelphia’s big alternative-weeklies have changed their online looks in recent months. It just so happens that the one that came out last may have started first.

At the end December, CityPaper, founded in 1981 by Bruce Schimmel, went from this to this. And then, early last month, Philadelphia Weekly made its own jump from a cluttered display.

“We knew we needed to step up our platform online, not just re-skin the site,” says Keith McGinnis, the IT Web head over at Review Publishing, PW’s Samson Street-based parent company. “Now we have a platform that can help us rise to the occasion.”

Read more