Steve Yelvington isn't its target demographic any more than I am, but he's impressed by Vita.mn, which he calls a "youth-focused" entertainment website from the Star Tribune in
Minneapolis. The behind-the-scenes connections to the newspaper are explained on the about page.
After just a short visit, I'm reminded of LJWorld's Lawrence.com
I do like the lead on the Vita.mn what-to-do-this-weekend column, offering alternatives to the offerings of "the holiday-industrial complex."
Steve sums up more of the features:
There's a lot to like in this effort -- wiki-like collaborative
"guides" authored by the community, a solid foundation of basic
listings, calendaring, free tagging and social networking. And it's
refreshingly fast. My only immediate complaint is that it doesn't do
enough to celebrate its "people" functionality -- some of the cool
stuff is quite buried.
Tech trivia #1: If you've seen the Googlezone prognostication EPIC 2014, Steve points out a creative connection with vita.mn
Tech trivia #2: The folks in Minnesota had to go a long way to get that .mn top level domain for the cute vita.mn name. Two letters at the end of a domain address usually indicate a site's country of origin, like ".uk" or ".fr" -- but entrepreneurs have long been selling domains for the countries that own .TV and .MD, and it looks like Mongolia has gotten in the act. Makes me wonder whether any something.tn sites are located outside of Tunisia.
Footnote: Back in the focus-on-youth department -- if you define
"youth" as "under 30" -- Boston.com has a multimedia (Flash)
presentation profiling a few of its area's non-geriatric residents: Ten from 20 to 30. Restless and youthful as I am, I didn't have the patience to wait for it to load over my retro modem connection.
Digression: Hip new (is the word "hip" still hip?) sites reminds me... Someone with a pair of very cool (does "cool" still mean hot?) boots stopped me in my tracks a few days ago with what I took as an obscure compliment... something about finding things on my "hub." Was that a new (hip? cool?) word for a home page, like my cluttered space at http://stepno.com?
Nope. What she said was that she has been using "yourhub," not mine. Yourhub is the community-focused blog and do-it-yourself news site affiliated with the News Sentinel. Here's its About page. (Oops. Not there yet.) Its focus isn't "youth" as much as "neighborhood," and mostly suburban. There is a "UT" section if you scroll down the list, but its main "community" news participant appears to be the UT public relations office. Full disclosure: This item is a "stealth" attempt to get my students to look at and compare alternative sites provided by newspapers. I'll stop with those three examples and encourage the class to find more.
11:09:41 AM 
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