Follow Us on Twitter, Get a Thing a Day

Last Sunday, at another great Boston Media Makers gathering, I told folks about some of the gems bubbling to the surface on 9Neighbors.

There was the video of a hawk lunching on a pigeon on Boston Common. The great pair of videos from Somerville City TV on the Assembly Square project. The photo of Dice-K's Nikes in the classical Greek art section of the MFA. I could go on and on -- lots of wonderful stuff.

In the flurry of tweets that followed BMM, I decided Twitter would be a good way to let people know about items I find.

So I setup 9N -- our 9Neighbors Twitter account. We'll use the account to send out a link that we like every day.

If you have link suggestions (for 9Neighbors the site, or the Twitter account), just reply to us via Twitter (@9n).

How Flickr Photos Appear on 9Neighbors

A Flickr user contacted us today wondering about our policy on use of Flickr photos.

Here it is:

We use photos distributed by Flickr in its feeds. Mostly, we use feeds for local tags like this one: api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=bostonma. Sometimes we also use feeds for specific users.

According to Flickr, photos that appear in feeds like the one above can be blogged, as long as attribution and links to the original item are provided (which we do). A Flickr user can prevent photos from appearing in feeds by switching the "Who can blog your photos" setting on this page: www.flickr.com/account/?tab=privacy.

I'm blogging this because we want to make sure we get it right. Hopefully folks will point out any problems or gray areas in the comments.

And the Most Popular Photos of December Were ...

Here they are, the winners of our first Shoot9N contest:

For Boston, it was "Swan Lake" by Sweetbriar


For Somerville, "Davis Square: Iced T Leaves" by rnolan1087



And for Cambridge, an untitled photo by baoram07



Congratulations to the winners. It's fun to see such wonderful local photography. I'm going to send them all a lovely book of photos.

We're going to be running Shoot9N again this month, so check back over the course of the month to vote on your favorite photos.

And Now ... A Little Contest

Now that our sorting and recommendation features are up and running, we're going to kick their tires with a little contest -- a local photo contest we're calling Shoot9N.


At the end of this month we're going to recognize the photos that were most popular with 9Neighbors users over the last month. We'll define most popular by the full-month rankings on our photo pages like this one in Somerville. In order to vote, you need to be registered with 9Neighbors. (That's easy to do here.)

If you're a photographer, it's simple to get your photos onto our site and into the contest. Just load them into Flickr, and tag them with either "Boston9N", "Cambridge9N" or "Somerville9N". We'll pick a winner from each community (the photo must be taken in the community). For now, we're going to keep the contest to just Boston, Cambridge and Somerville.

Shoot9N is an experiment. This time around we're just trying to gauge interest and see how it works. We hope to do more with it future months.

Ultimately, our goals with Shoot9N are the same as our goals with 9Neighbors. We want to draw attention to the great stories being told in and about our communities, and we want to support the people telling them.

New This Week: Recommendations

This week's 9Neighbors update is a big step forward.

As of Sunday evening, you can recommend any story you find on 9Neighbors.com. By recommending a story, you give it a vote that will help it rise in the rankings we're now using to sort our "Popular" pages. That means the best content in your community is getting a broader audience.

It's very easy to recommend an item. You can do so on the new "Recommend this?" line on 9Neighbors.com, or in the small frame we're now adding above pages you click to from 9Neighbors.

It's only been a few days since we enabled recommendations, but they've completely changed the site. Instead of a random stream of all recent content, our pages now bubble great stuff to the top, and keep it there for a bit.

The current Somerville page is a great example. It's linking to a Live Journal discussion about privacy and Tufts University's Naked Quad run, a great photo from Flickr user rnolan108, a post about a bike accident on Clarendon Hill this morning, a city notice on lice, a School Committee report on its goals, and several stories from the Somerville Journal. We're thrilled to see such a broad range of content on the site.

We're going to continue to incorporate your feedback and improve 9Neighbors. As we move forward, we hope to make it even easier for people to discover their community's best new media and information.

What's Your Topic?

New feature alert!

For the past week we've been rolling out a major new addition to 9Neighbors: topic pages.

Now, in addition to the main summaries of links we provide for each of our five communities, we're also grouping articles in each community into categories. Each of these categories has its own feed. So, if you want a simple way to follow stories about the Cambridge city workers arrested for selling drugs out of a city-owned truck last week, you can subscribe to the Cambridge crime page. You can check out the other topics in each community's topic index.

As you can see from the image below, we're also linking to topic pages from the article summaries we provide on our main pages. We hope these links provide folks with more context for the items we list on 9Neighbors.
We have lots more news in the pipeline, so stayed tuned. And, as always, we'd love to hear from you.

Add Your Feeds to 9Neighbors

Eagle-eyed 9Neighbors-users may have already figured this out, but we launched an update of the site over the weekend.

This time the headliner is a new feed function.

If you produce any type of feed about your community, you can now build a bigger audience by loading your feed into 9Neighbors. Just paste your feed address into the form on this page. Once it's loaded, a headline and short summary will appear on 9Neighbors every time you publish new content.

Here's what you'll see when you add the feed:



As always, let us know if you have any feedback. We'd love to hear from you.