by @BarryRafkind in Announcements
Posted on August 11, 2009 at 11:59 pm
Last Modified on August 12, 2009 at 12:06 am
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Today, Somerville became the 4th community in the “North of Boston” region to have its own Your Town portal on Boston.com. Your Town websites are local hubs for real estate, events, sports, news, schools, and discussions.
The Your Town sites are grouped by region (North of Boston, Metro West, and South Shore). Somerville joins Malden, Melrose, and Medford in the “North of Boston” region. Our region is covered by an editor, Marcia Dick, and a correspondent, Travis Anderson. Welcome to Somerville!
The Somerville site links to posts in local blogs. So far, they link to two SV posts : Attend town hall meetings and get active under “Your Blogs” and Soccer for young athletes with disabilities on Sept. 13 under “Sports”.
Check out the Somerville Your Town site and then tell us what you think!
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Barry, I have a question for you. Is there a particular reason you already have the just announced boston.com local site in your “Local Media” section and not the Somerville News?
In the past I believe you mentioned because they don’t link back to this weblog, but, out of the six you have listed, one isn’t even online anymore and only 2 out of the 6 link back here (SJ and SCAT). That answer doesn’t hold water anymore.
I believe you also mentioned something at one point about there being too much trash talking over there, but, they changed the format and haven’t had any nastiness over there on either their website or their weblog in well over a year. That answer doesn’t hold water anymore.
Since you have relied on both of those explanations in the past, and clearly they no longer apply, does that mean you will be putting them on here? I would think that you would want to preserve the consistency of your progressive “open to everyone” message, no?
I am curious as to how you explain this away at this point, especially since I have seen Mr. Norton post very helpful and thoughtful comments here and has been a consistently level-headed person on this blog. Enough is enough, don’t you think?
J. Caputo
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Hi John,
The reason I just announced the Your Town site is because it just launched on Tuesday. The SN has been around for a long time so there was no need to announce it.
Thanks for pointing out that one of the links (The Bridge) is broken. I’ll have it removed.
Your Town Somerville links to SV stories from its Your Blogs section. I’m not sure if Tufts Daily or YourArlington links back to us, so I’ll have to inquire about that.
I still think there’s too much trash talking at the SN, especially in the editorials which are usually quite vague and incoherent, so I tend to ignore them as noise. I actually haven’t kept up with the comments on that site lately, so I’m not sure if they’ve gotten better since the bad old days.
I’d disagree that Jamie Norton has been a “consistently level-headed person on this blog”, but I do agree he has made some constructive comments here and I hope to see more of it. But, I can assure you his behavior on SV has nothing to do with our decision on whether to link to the SN or not.
I told Jamie we’d link to his blog if he linked to us (only fair, right?). He said they were working on adding a links section, but I haven’t seen any progress on that yet. Think of this as our bargaining chip to get a link back from “Somerville’s Most Widely Read Newspaper”, at least as the SN proclaims itself on its blog. On its main site, they profess to be “Somerville’s Only Independent Newspaper” which is funny because it’s actually jointly owned by the Nortons, who also run the ERA real estate company, and by Bill Tauro who owns Pat’s Towing company.
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Hi John, since the SN appears to be unwilling or unable to add a blog roll section to their website or blog, the SV team has decided to just go ahead and link to it since SN articles and commentary should be of interest to our readers. So, we have now added a link to the SN main site under our Local Media section on the right side. ->
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I would love to know why my name showed up as someone else who has posted on here. There might be something wrong with your site, maybe two postings got crossed somehow? My email is jcaputo68@ymail.com, maybe you can check it out and send me a private email letting me know if you find anything? John
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Not sure, John, I thought it was a typo. Interestingly, you both commented in quick succession from the same IP address, so maybe he’s nearby and you can ask him yourself. You also made a typo in your email address (ymail), so maybe you are both related. I’ll email you privately to discuss this further.
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