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.