Seriously.  This is a remarkable amount of snow.  And it just keeps coming.  But before we get carried away with our excitable claims of Snowpocalypse/Snowmageddeon/SNOMG!/Snowprah, check out these Tribune Archive photos (more here) from the ’67 storm.  That’s some serious accumulation too…

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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We used to work together and this guy’s definitely not a slacker–he is however, truly candid.  And he speaks for a lot of us these days.  Between Facebook, Twitter, RSS feeds and website aggregators, we spend so much time staying connected that it’s hard to get anything done.  We’re so busy keeping up that we can hardly keep up.

Two separate experiences this weekend threw this growing time management issue into sharp relief.  First, a friend took me to a booksigning for “In With The Devil” at a home in River Forest on Saturday night. Learning about a book from the author is always fascinating but what intrigued me even more was the homeowner, or more importantly, the projects he cranks out of his garage workshop.  He and my friend had already collaborated on hand building two wood strip canoes–a feat of craftsmanship that bowled me over.  But now, he’s in the midst of building a personal submarine.  In his garage.  By himself.

I feel productive when I make dinner–I can’t begin to imagine researching and then slowly assembling a submersible watercraft powered by electric trolling motors.  I left the host’s house astonished by the ingenuity coming together just on the other side of his unremarkable garage door.

Second, I read John Lopez’ piece in the Arts & Entertainment section of the Sunday Chicago Tribune.  He described how writers, artists and musicians struggle to step away from the relentless e-stream, and the toll this constant distraction can take on their craft.  This challenge affects many people in our increasingly digital world, but it hits creative people particularly hard.   Realizing a personal vision requires dropping deeply into the work, and our overwired lifestyle fights that with every new text message.  Isn’t it interesting how neither the screenwriter (Aaron Sorkin) nor the two lead actors (Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake) of The Social Network use Facebook at all.  Hmmm…

A few years ago, pundits claimed that a sign of true power was to not be reachable.  These days, a sign of true will power is to not reach out.

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By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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All News (and opinion and jokes and gossip) Is Local

I wish them well, though I’m clearly not in their demographic.  I subscribe to the Trib and until someone comes up with an elegantly-interactive digital crossword, I’ll stay analog.  Moreover, I like the illusion that my news at least postures as objective; the injection of obvious left or right bias in every item both exhausts and depresses me.

ChicagoNow appeals to its nascent audience with a pretty wide variety of News and Opinion, Life and Style, Arts and Entertainment, and Sports blogs–category headings seemingly taken right off their print mastheads.  A quick skim of their content reveals a largely newspaper-like tone, albeit with the amped up personality and opinions of the individual bloggers.  For me, the reading experience was not unlike an evening of Chicago Improv: a few remarkable moments separated by a lot of meandering development.  Then again, the analog version contains a lot of material I skim or ignore as well.

The word ‘community’ appears repeatedly throughout the site’s background pages; something that will prove simultaneously crucial as they pitch potential advertisers and challenging as their biggest potential stumbling block.  The best online communities build organically (for perspective, check out this month’s Wired magazine’s article on Craig Newmark, founder of Craigslist).  As Clay Shirky writes, Web 2.0 means we no longer need organizations to organize.  Moreover, the user experience needs to come first and foremost and on that count, ChicagoNow seems to be doing it right.  You don’t need to register to access the content, but it does unlock other features like comments.  The ill-fated, arrived too early, saddled-by-regulatory redtape Bud.tv ultimately collapsed due to those onerous restraints as the hassles to the user outweighed the benefits of the content.

Will ChicagoNow take off and ultimately fill the expanding gap in the Tribune’s audience with new, revenue-generating readers?  It’s too early to say, but as a fan of newspapers, I hope it does.  And if nothing else, good on them for trying.

By Dennis Ryan, CCO, Element 79

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