Lee Semel

Today we’re launching the new nextNY blog. If you’re not familiar with nextNY, it’s a group that started as an informal gathering of young people in the NY technology and digital media community. It all began with a single announcement made by Charlie O’Donnell at a Meetup last year. Since then it’s grown to over 600 people, and we’ve had a lot of great events since then.

At one of these events, we talked about the future of the NY technology community, and proposed ways to help it grow. One of the issues raised was that NY companies and personalities just don’t have a very high profile. This blog is designed to help change that. It will cover NY technology, entrepreneurship, startups, digital media, events, personalities, companies, success stories, and bring together the leading voices of the industry.

How does the nextNY blog work?
Anthony from SquareSpace did a great job setting up our original blog, which was run by a team of authors from nextNY. Unfortunately, it garnered only a few posts per month. Maintaining a separate blog was just too much extra work. To really make an impact, we needed more content, updated more frequently.

The new blog is designed to make this happen, with minimal extra effort. In true “Web 2.0” fashion, this blog builds on user-generated content that’s already out there. It’s an aggregator, automatically pulling in posts from authors’ individual blogs.

Who can join?
Anyone who blogs about the technology and digital media industry in New York is welcome to join up and post their content. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a venture capitalist, programmer, designer, entrepreneur, or journalist, as long as you have an interest in the NY technology and digital media industry.

How do I join?
It’s simple.

• Send us the URL of your RSS feed.
• Wordpress users: Set up a ‘nextNY’ category in Wordpress, and apply it to any posts you want to appear on the nextNY blog.
• Blogger users: Use a “nextNY” label for any post you want to appear on the nextNY blog.

We’ve posted a nextNY Blog FAQ containing guidelines, content ideas, and other information. Let’s get started and help ensure NYC’s place in the future of technology and digital media.

Today marks the kickoff of the NextNY blog, dedicated to the technology industry in New York. This blog was started by a group of dedicated people I’m proud to be a part of, called NextNY, that’s dedicated to the technology and internet industry in New York. So much of the press seems to focus on what’s going on in Silicon Valley, when there are a lot of interesting things going on right here: new startups, interesting people, and emerging ideas. If you’re in the New York area, check it out, and if you have something to say, become a contributor. Like all aspects of NextNY, this is a group effort, and you can do something just by doing it.

I can’t keep track of all the postings on all the blogs I read. There has to be a blog reader that will take all my feeds, and figure out which are the best posts, by scouring sites like Reddit, Digg or Technorati, or checking the number of comments or links to the item, or some other method, and show you what’s worth reading. This would be like having a personal Digg with just the feeds I want. If you know of anything like this, let me know!

Almost all blogs are organized chronologically, kind of like the news ticker in Times Square. They focus on what’s newest, and anything that’s old is relegated to the black hole known as the “Archives”.

This is a shame because a lot of the most interesting and insightful writing on blogs has long-lasting value. For instance, here’s a great article on search engine optimization, but it’s buried under ‘General’. It would have been nice to find this a few weeks ago when I was actually looking for information on this topic.

Compare how blogs are structured this to traditional, “Web 1.0″ style content sites, which nearly always include a hierarchy of categories and subcategories. The best blogs do this, and offer multiple ways to find postings. Apartment Therapy, for example, does a good job of categorizing by stores, services, house tours, and other topics.

Search engines offer little help. Technorati generally returns an irrelevant batch of results, sorted by date, with no concept of relevancy or page rank. Google searches the entire web, returning a giant mishmash of results. There’s no way to express the fact that I’m searching for information as opposed to products or businesses. Hopefully the search engines will step up to the challenge and make the wealth of information in blog archives easier to find.