Norm is correct about internal site organization (taxonomy in Drupal nomenclature) and making a site useful / attractive.  Sites become instinctive when you understand how things are organized.  They become like grocery stores.  When you want to find something, look at the overhead signs (navigation menus) and try to relate what you are looking for to one of the broad categories.  If the information is well organized, you should be able to navigate the web / grocery store efficiently and come back again.

Derek Arnold

One thing that is for sure is realneo will be an information overload - the site is full of 1,000s of pages of content, and probably 100,000s of links.

We can build a front end that is more graphical and Flashy, but one step in most people will be there to read and write so will expect a "newspaper", blog or forum type format.

When I come to realneo now I check to see who's online and new, see the block of my buddies' recent posts, and then whether there are new comments or postings. I check back a few times a day, and interact if there's anything new of interest. Once the calendar gets filled up, I'll get in the habit of checking that. Once more people I know are using realneo, I expect to use private messaging more. I see it becoming very useful to help me manage information overload in many ways.

Tim Berners-Lee's site is an example of the belief that 

information is paramount.  For the most part, I agree.  Sure,

this site could use some dolling up but the site is what it

purports to be: a page with info about the creator of the

World Wide Web.  It isn't pretty, but it works.  I am not

thrilled about scrolling but sometimes it's necessary.  The

same with Tribe.  The true skill of web design is making a

site usable and pretty.

Derek Arnold

Here are two sites that actually run drupal.

• theonion.com
• Ourmedia.org

Note that you can login to ourmedia using your realneo account information, e.g.:

robataka [at] www [dot] realneo [dot] us

What we specialize in is a good question. We provide a free, open source virtual community for people to collaborate and communicate, and we have driven people to use that for raising awareness around economic development in Northeast Ohio.

We specialize in providing the capabilities to develop virtual communities, and we develop world-class virtual community capabilities, and we enable and deliver world-class virtual communities, like realneo.us.

Another virtual community we are enabling is for Voices and Choices, which will have 10,000s of members, generating lots of traffic and activity. Ultimately, the community of voices and choices, and realneo, and the sustainability and arts communities, and all others interested in this region and using technology well will all use realneo and many other internetworked virtual communities.

I think one thing that will draw people in will be the events calendars - both the content and the filtering are very useful... there are lots of enhancements and design opportunities to come with handling this.

I also find the realneo content is very good, even though it only represents input of a small group of people. The community and content are growing, and this forum is a good example of that. The content - the dynamic of interactive content - will keep people coming back.

Many people will use the blogs and image galleries, just as they are intended. As more people use the site, more people will rise up as leaders of forums, will add events and other content, and the site will become increasingly interesting.

I think good design will add wow and oooh. I'm counting on our design community to make that happen. I'll offer my feedback but it's up to you artisits to make this happen.

I do want to feature local art in the design and content, and encourage local artists to use the technology and develop themes. I think this will help them gain more market awareness and sell art.

We'll soon have many themes people can choose from - Rob wants something very fast and stark while you want something very graphical - my 12 year old daughter wants something light - and doesn't want a bunch of boring adult RSS feeds but wants to see what her buddies posted. 

So we need to quickly knock out a nice redesign of the current realneo.us site - and fix some module and CSS issues - and update the taxonomy - and at the same time we will work on future wow, oooh, and artsyness. 

ASAP, we want to deliver a bleeding edge experience that will bring millions of people together from around the world 

vlog or video blog is a blog (short for weblog) which uses video as the primary content; the video is linked to within a videoblog post and usually accompanied by supporting text, image, and additional meta data to provide context.

Blogs often take advantage of RSS for syndication to other web sites and aggregator software (RSS readers). With the inclusion of RSS Enclosures, which provides the ability to attach media files to a feed item/blog post, it is possible to bypass the mainstream intermediaries and openly distribute media to the masses via the Internet. Vlogs typically take advantage of this technological development, just as audioblogs have in recent years via the podcast boom.

Videoblogging gains popularity with each passing month, especially since the release of the new Apple Video iPod and the availability of iTunes Store's video content. iTunes uses the term video podcast to describe a video blog.

more info:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vlog

How about implementing a Cellphone Vlog solution and feed it back out with RSS?

Check out:

http://www.mobvcasting.com/wp/

__________________

More info:

http://www.walking-productions.com/slop/cat_vlog.html

"I have been doing something that I call MobVCasting for some time.

Essentially, it is video blogging with a twist. My vlog posts are created, edited as well as posted directly from my mobile phone. I use MMS (or Multimedia Messaging or picture messaging or whatever your provider calls it) to post videos to my vlog.

You can see what I do by visiting http://www.mobvcasting.com/wp/

I am almost to the point where I feel comfortable offering this capability to all who are brave enough to try.

Although I am not ready for offering personalized service (which would entail posting to your blog though mobvcasting), I have opened up a test MobVCasting vlog that anyone is free to post to. I am calling it OpenVlog at MobVCasting. You can see it at: http://www.openvlog.mobvcasting.com/

Anyone is welcome to use their mobile phone to post to this "open" vlog. You will need a video capable phone and the ability to send MMS (multimedia messages or picture mail or whatever your provider calls it) to an email address. The address for this service is openvlog [at] mobvcasting [dot] com. The subject of your message will be the title of the post and any text in the body of the message becomes the body of the text.

One last thing, your mobile phone provider may charge you to send MMS messages. So if you give it a shot, don't go overboard until you get your first bill.

Please feel free to send any questions or comments my way: shawn [at] mobvcasting [dot] com"

Offer cellphone wallpapers designed by local artists

Offer cellphone ringtones developed by local musicians

provide guidelines and instructions on how to create

Be able to offer them free or for sale. Maybe offer a different free set every week, that would bring people back to the site to check to see what is free each week.

One example of what can be done with Event RSS is deployed at Lawrence.com. There you can subscribe to a general event rss, or even event rss for specific bands for example. Or specific venues as another example. The Lawrence.com site is powered by a system called Django, which was specifically developed in python to power that site and the Chicago Crime.org site. It was subsequently released as open source.

There are a couple of things that are possible here. First of all, RealNEO already has event listings. I am confused as to the difference in the top menu thing between events and calendar as they appear to me to be the same thing. One order of business would be to create a rss feed out of these event listings. One cool thing about the Realneo event listing is that you can download the event listing as an ical file and merge it with your work/personal calendar. For example, I am able to download it and merge it into my Kontact calendar.

The other thing is that we also have a feed aggregator on RealNEO. It should be fairly straight forward create one for events that already have RSS feeds. We just need to know where event feeds are located so we can pull them.

Sorry, but sort of a random thought comment....

There is no doubt one of the killer aps is the calendar - the Holy Grail. As soon as we have a centralized calendar for Northeast Ohio, which communicates with the calendars of all the organizations in NEO, and all the personal calendars of the members of the virtual community, we will have a highly effective community. For now, we can accomplish much of this with realneo.us and filtering by categories (and content type). What we still need to determine is what is the best taxonomy for the filtering - we'll discuss this over the coming weeks.... it's tricky.

This site (upcoming.org) is pretty good, actually. There's nothing visually stunning about it, but it seems really easy to use. I really like how the mission statement is right there to see, so that you know immediately what the site is about. There is then a very clear area in the middle that answers the basic questions that any user will have (how do I start, etc.). Good, simple design.