Secrets of the City

Looks kind of lame.

Really? A Mongolia domain? Really?

Matt and Margaret are the brains behind it, and a lot of people around these parts have been playing with it for months. Once people dive into the social side of it, I think they’ll enjoy it. Here’s my profile:

http://www.vita.mn/user_profile.php?user_id=12

(And it’s not really about conversation — it’s more about calendars and identity. So I think of it as a different deal than MNspeak.)

Spent 5 minutes. Never going back. The Strib is still a poor product.

I’m with Rex.
It’s less about discussion and more about knowing where to go and when.

hooray! congrats matt and margaret, and everyone.

i think it’s pretty cool, we need a site like this.

i couldn’t register when it was beta, but now i’m all up in there.

I agree with Chuck. I have no idea where to find out what things are going on.

I think it’s great. Nice interface. Easy to navigate. It seems to have social networking potential. But they’re really first to have a comprehensive guide of where to go, what to do, etc. I don’t see it as competition to this site, as I wouldn’t feel a need to check it daily (sorry Margaret). But it serves a really nice niche.

Totally off topic, but Jason I was wondering if Don Shelby’s In the Know is connected to or resulted in the idea on the CBS Evening News of having “guest editorials.” Not specifically the format or anything, but just the idea of having an editorial in the news program.

Goes to prove the theory that city people simply live in the city because they love restaurants.

KSTP just made one of the funniest typos I’ve ever seen.

For the record, I was not trying to “fire one across the bow” of the strib. I doubt my biggest canon would even get the Star Tribune’s attention. I have been told by several knowledgeable people that the Strib is building Vita.mn to operate in the MNspeak-type market, but not necessarily as a direct competitor. As I said in the post, it looks like they’re more like Upcoming.org than MNspeak.

It remains to be seen whether I’m right about the Juliette Lewis thing.

Why the hell would we need another site about what to do in the Twin Cities? There are about a hundred already, no?

I really wish they didn’t make you use a different e-mail address than your Startribune.com e-mail address.

I doubt my biggest canon would even get the Star Tribune’s attention.

It’s your pen people are terrified of.

Canons are much more dangerous than cannons.

But they’re really first to have a comprehensive guide of where to go, what to do, etc. \

you are joking, right derusha?

It’s no SotanLife!

i saw big ads for SotanLife in the bathroom at First Ave tonight and thought, “they’re still around?” i just never bought into the name i guess.

also, i agree with Chuck. i have no idea what’s going on.

That’s a pretty sweet domain. I’ve wanted a similar “domain hack” but Ireland doesn’t like selling their .ie to people outside of Ireland.

I was joking about them being first. But they do have the nicest interface I’ve seen.

As for the commentary thing: because of our ratings success, I do know that Rome Hartman and the CBS-types have been taking a look at what we’ve been doing. Not sure if “Free Speech” is a ripoff… but I imagine it’s inspired by “In the Know.”

The plural of cannon is cannon.

uh, wow, a tag cloud. that’s *soooo* web 2.0 guys! woo!

Seriously, though, if it’s not about conversation why bother? I couldn’t figure out what the fuck was the point of it when I went there, so I just closed it and gave up.

I quit after trying to register with the username “emoeby”. It came back saying there was already an emoeby registered. Ok, so I thought maybe I forgot my password. Nope, no username of emoeby was registered. WTF.

I’d love to check out this new site, but I’m still trying to clean the vomit off my screen from the Lennar backdrop on startribune.com (Kudos to the staff there for being a finalist in the 2006 Online Journalism Awards despite their site’s design).

I think Margaret did a really nice job with the design of vita.mn. However, on the content side of things, I did a search of sports bars in the Twin Cities had 5 results. The same search at sotanlife.com gave me 156.

Mmmmmmmm…….Margaret.

Why do you need to do an internet search for sports bars. There’s one on every corner in the suburbs.

Well it’s not as vapid as that new mag I got in the mail…METRO.

Ugh!

Hipster porn!

Ewwwww!

Seacrest, out!

If only it was hipster porn.

I wanna see what happens when the white belts come off!

i’m now site expert..like many others seem to be.
i think this has a ton of potential. something i might actually use. hmmmm something for people who actually go out and have a social life and don’t just read about it. worth a second look i think.

Hey, folks. Thanks for checking out the site. Matt B. and other Juliette Lewis detractors/devotees, I invite you to have at it.

If you’re a registered user of StarTribune.com, registration is super-janky. Sorry about that. Moe, I’m guessing that’s what you ran into. I explain in more detail (or at least make more excuses) here.

Anyway, seamless user registration and many other shiny things are in the works. I can’t promise hipster porn, but c’mon, Max, that really is everywhere.

mthomps: Did you create the vita.mn site for Star Tribune? The site looks okay, albeit a bit busy for most users tastes, I think. Average users dont get ‘tagging’…

IMO, it looks like the sotanlife site with a lighter background. In fact, it seems like the exact same concept as sotanlife. Did you model your site after sotanlife?

Not speaking for him, but yes, Matt is a deputy editor at StarTribune.com. I name-checked him way back here.

I don’t get the comparisons to sotanlife or mnspeak.

(Disclaimer: if one could own stocks in people, I’d own some heavy shares of Matt and Margaret.)

Great, now the Sotanlife guy is going to come back here and get all cranky.

“Average users don’t get tagging”?

Minnesota and the midwest in general seems to lag at least a year behind on technology trends but even that statement seems hard to believe. And I don’t think you really have to “get” tagging to use the site as an useful directory so long as a small percentage of active users start contributing their own thoughts and views ala the wiki feature, it snowballs. Think about delicious/popular for example.

I’d wager that vita.mn isn’t targetted at the segment of the browsing population that doesn’t “get” tagging. That segment of the population actually reads the A&E section of the newspaper.

Vita.mn is closer to yelp minus the nifty mobile features than it is to sotanlife. I don’t get the comparisons to mnspeak either, since vita.mn has actual social software potential and this place has never been much more than a half-assed blog aggregator and a snarky, threaded links forum/metafilter clone minus the interesting metablog.

Either way, competition for our attention is a good thing so long as it spurs innovation.

Can i ask what makes those two such a hot commodityu?

So matt and margarets legacy will be using their inguinuity to expand the mcclatchy empire? at the end of th day, they still own nothing. if they were smart they would have developed the product indepently…

“Minnesota and the midwest in general seems to lag at least a year behind on technology trends but even that statement seems hard to believe.”

Yeah, the Twin Cities is just congregation of farming villages, after-all. (I never believed anything about all that technological nonsense anyway. Let’s stick to what we know best – Cows, Chicken, and Grain.)

Seriously though, while I will agree with your statement that the vita.mn directory can be useful (about as useful as it can be on thriftyhipster, sotanlife, or the 50 other local sites we have, not to mention tha national sites like yelp, eventful, upcoming, or even *bleh* citysearch…) I will argue that “tagging” is already on it’s way out the door.

I can see it now. “Tagging? That’s so 2006.”

It will be interesting to see how their site unfolds. Perhaps it will be more than just another “Me Too” site — But that would take some substantial effort from a people who are at least a year behind this revolutionary tagging trend, right?

This post was tagged with: Minneapolis, Entertainment, and Splash of Sarcasm.

stockinpeople:

Behind your sarcastic tone, there’s an interesting notion, one which I suspect a lot of us who work in creative/media/culture industries think about a lot: when do you do something solo versus when do you find the support of a corporation? This site itself is an interesting case, right? Same thing goes with successful bands courted by a big label, aspiring journalists who want to start publications, restaurateurs who have an inventive palette, or any number of similar endeavors. I don’t know if there’s a perfect answer, but I suspect it can vary from Steve Albini to Bill Gates (two ends of the coin I’ve seen both sides of) from case to case.

So that’s one part of it. The other part is that several of us who work in media are still fighting a strange fight. And losing. If you haven’t noticed, the media industry ain’t doing very well right now. And while everyone tries to figure out if micro-media (that’s you and me, folks) can do anything to save it, some of us are trying to figure out if “big media” has anything left for our society. Does it? That’s an extremely complicated question, which is probably a little too big for this forum…

Finally, why are these two good “investments”? For no other reason than being very sharp people. (And only one of them stayed up all night with me on my final night in town, kicking my ass in Rummy 500.) I really don’t know if Vita.MN will be a success, but I LOVE the idea that mainstream news organizations are trying out new things, because they’re getting their asses kicked by the Craiglist/Google/Yahoo thing right now. And the gamble of small sites like this is ridiculously small compared to, say, launching a new section in the paper.

maybe & tmay:

Tagging is about, ya know, 5% of Vita.MN. I’m not sure why people are obsessing over it.

rex used all those words to say “hey, they gotta pay the rent somehow.”

You say you’d bet on Matt and Margaret at vita.mn? Why would you bet on someone who wouldn’t bet on themselves? Entrepreneurs or employees, one’s good bet, one isn’t.

My money’s on MMMMMMMMMMMargaret…to be HOT!

rex used all those words to say “hey, they gotta pay the rent somehow.”

Perhaps continuing to work for ‘the man’ is the difference between paying ‘the rent‘ and paying ‘the mortgage‘.

Sharp people as they may be, I agree with the other stockinpeople & just wonderin’. If you’ve got a great product, and you know it will fly, ESPECIALLY with the low-overhead that product like vitamn probably has, you should go with it on your own.

Matt and Margaret get a pat on the back and a “dat a’ boy”, but it’s the McClatchy executives taking it to the bank.

Just my two cents.

Web 2.0 Logos. Where’s yours?

I’ll have Rex’s “omega” version with all the gloss, bevels, and reflectivity ready by EOD.

i will say that i’m pretty damn tech savvy, am a web developer myself, and i don’t even find “tagging” all that useful or helpful personally. so i don’t think it’s really about “not understanding” it, or being “behind” at all.

also, yeah i got bit by the startribune.com email/username bug as well. oh well, as long as my username is “taken” by my strib account i can wait to register.

as for sotanlife.com, very nice design & content, but as Rex mentioned, terrible domain name imo. in fact for the first few times i saw that domain while pissing at some random downtown location, i didn’t even get what the hell a “sotan” was… i’m like “so tan?” what the hell is that? maybe that’s because i’ve only lived here 7 years now and wasn’t born nor grew up here? i dunno.

also, Jason Derusha sighting last night at the Guthrie, OMG OMG OMG!

It’s nice to be seen, Kyle. The show was great. Really liked The Real Thing.

Did you try the bar downstairs. They have some intriguing specalty cocktails, and poured aproper Pimms cup, which, as you know, is a rarity in this city.

I enjoyed a Tom Collins at the bar in the Cue. A little too liquory, actually. I’m surprised to be saying that. Anyway, I had a cucumber mojito the last time I was at the Cue, it was fantastic. This is so off-topic. Sorry.

Ooh, I wanted to try the cucumber mojito, but didn’t see their specialty drink list until after I’d already enjoyed my share of cocktails. Next time, perhaps.

What was the topic?

I think we were talking about vita.mn

Oh. Well, we should post our Cue comments there, then.

read about a pom-cucumber martini at mission on vita.mn
WOW full circle.

Jason, yeah i enjoyed The Real Thing as well. the musical references in particular

My wife was actually the one who spotted you guys a few rows in front of us “hey, isn’t that guy on the news?”

we were very impressed w/ the new Guthrie and are excited to go back soon hopefully

That theater is shockingly red.

It is. And I like that. The seats are comfortable too.

“Minnesota and the midwest in general seems to lag at least a year behind on technology trends but even that statement seems hard to believe.”

Well, actually, Minneapolis is considered to be the nation’s “Top Tech City” according to Popular Science.

Take that, Silicon Valley!