Philly Future, has been a one person volunteer effort for five years. I believe this latest iteration provides me with the tools to change that. I’d like Philly Future to live up to its original promise: to be a platform for citizen driven, local online journalism. It has become the place to find Philly bloggers. I am getting at least one request to add to the site a day! 69 at last count! Independent bloggers are the greatest, most original writers out there. But how to take the next step?
Two things I am already doing:
1. I’ve offered a very public hand of friendship and cooperation to PhillyBlog.com. They have not responded to my offer however. This is after many, many emails and my reaching out on their own forums.
2. Sent emails to start discussions with a few thought leaders in the space to gather their opinions.
What do you think? How come I feel the answer is right under my nose?
Karl, sorry had to proxy in, I think you still banned Neo, so I’m reversed.
It’s good that you are trying to grow with your ideas and platforms. It’s also nice to see you put your comment section back up. I take your post as a request from viewers of paradox1x.org as necessary feedback, so I’ll give some before I head back to socomm.
I’ve enclosed portions of your post in brackets and will comment after.
It’s great that you get requests to link; networking is a good first step.
This will only continue, look at the stats of users that blog (as well as the comments ppl leave behind as a sign of what pushes peoples buttons.) Look for trends and streamline your look to fit.
You have lots of content within your pages but it doesn’t catch the eye right away. If it doesn’t visually stand out to the eye, people will click on elsewhere and you might lose a chance to capture a new reader. As you can tell by your comment sections. I don’t see many people posting there. (this isn’t a putdown) This all depends on how much you want to reach out and grow.
While many bloggers may ask you to link, it doesn’t mean that will draw more to your forums. Setting up a platform that may geographically reference area’s may be easier to navigate than long pages with lots of hyperlinks.
Again, networking is important; but you already know this. Setup a way of getting some discussion according to topics instead of throwing it all in one spot. This gives readers a means to select an area of interest instead of trying to find what they like in a page full of articles that aren’t listed by genres or topics per se.
You already have the answer, you may be looking for someone to tell you that your idea is a good one. It’s called a support network, maybe others feel the same as you do and they are also looking for the same nudge.
The question you need to ask yourself is how much time you have to spend on this. You also have to ask yourself what your goal is and apply yourself accordingly.
Remember: There is no spoon.
Peace
Thanks for the feedback. I definitely need to work on the site’s look. An important point though – it’s not a message forum. That’s not its purpose. I would have worked with entirely different software and designed the site far differently if that was its goal. That in turn, points to an interesting question: is its purpose not evident from the home page? And the answer to that (judging from your response) is apparently no. So that’s a good place to focus on, so thanks.