You may still vaguely remember the Propel Pittsburgh Commission, Mayor Ravenstahl’s plan to get together a bunch of smart young people to find ways to keep other young people in Pittsburgh. So far, it’s been a little less than stellar; we’ve been around for a year, and we’ve yet to even make a single formal recommendation, let alone start trying to do something. At our meeting this week, we were told in no uncertain terms that His Honor The Mayor is aware of this, and he is not pleased. Longtime readers know that I’m more of a Peduto-head, but nevertheless, Mayor Luke deserves credit for at least keeping an eye on his creation and trying to make it produce something useful. He’s even gone a bit further and given us a new staff person who has orders to whip us back into shape.

The fundamental problem, though, is one that seems to plague many public boards and commissions: people just plain don’t show up. We know there have been several resignations, although the complete list isn’t available. Beyond those, there’s another five to ten people who haven’t been seen since the first meeting. There was pretty steep competition to get onto this commission in the first place, and we see a bunch of empty chairs that are itching to be filled. The reason for this non-attendance is unclear, but as far as we can guess, it’s about schedule. We meet Downtown in the early evening, because the city officials who support us want to go home just as much as we do. Problem is, most young people don’t have total control over our work schedules, and if Propel is at the wrong time, then one more Commissioner is SOL.

Of course, such young tech-savvy personages as MetBlog readers might ask: can’t you people just do business over email, have conference calls, and otherwise use technology to quit spewing so much carbon? We could… except for this eensy thing called the Open Records Law. Turns out that as long as we’re a formal Commission, we have to comply with Open Records. That means all meetings scheduled in advance, open to the public, minutes kept, etc. Hard to shoehorn a listserv into that framework. As the years march on, more and more of the world’s governance is going to use electronic mechanisms, and this sort of thing is going to be a royal pain in the butt. Probably a good thing for some enterprising young state legislator to be considering…

In the meantime, despite all these slings and arrows, we actually have gotten some work done, particularly about immigration. More on that in a future post.

The Post-Gazette has, on Sundays, been running a feature called “The Cutting Edge”, where they post snippets from Pittsburgh-related blogs. (Yes, I still get 90% of my news on dead trees. Portable, useful for stuffing shipping boxes, and doesn’t require me to pay some silly “hotspot” to read it.) It has sunk to new lows. You may recall that Chinese newspaper that accidentally recycled a story from The Onion?. Scroll down this week’s Cutting Edge and find “One of America’s great newspapers” doing the same thing. I’d like to hope they’re just adding it in as a bit of comic belief, but the lack of framing text makes me think someone there is just plain asleep at the switch.

Not to worry, though. They’re a “manufacturer” according to state law, and thus aren’t required to pay property taxes. With all that money they’re saving, I’m sure they can put it towards finding, you know, real news to report on once in a while.

Well here is something to be happy about – Pittsburgh is not on Forbes Magazine’s List of the top 10 most miserable cities. We have been talking about this article on the Metrobloggers authors list and everyone agrees that this list extra miserable because the people at Forbes put it into a slide show, instead of just giving you a list. So to save you the trouble of watching a miserable slide show, here is the list:

1. Detroit, MI
2. Stockton, CA
3. Flint, MI
4. New York, NY
5. Philadelphia, PA
6. Chicago, IL
7. Los Angeles, CA
8. Modesto, CA
9. Charlotte, NC
10. Providence, RI

Ii am not sure how I feel about the criteria of this list, it is based on a lot of economic data. I know that there are tons of people who live in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles that love it there. Check out the responses from these cities:
Los Angeles
Detroit

I write a lot of blog posts. It started with IheartPGH.com and then led to a job at Spreadshirt where I update Blog.Spreadshirt.com almost everyday. Over the past 2.5 years since I started blogging I have learned that a blog is a great tool for sharing lots of information with lots of other people. I am often asked to answer the question “why should I have a blog for my business/club/organization?” and the answer is simple, but not easy to explain.
I usually send people to this video about RSS feeds – RSS in Plain English.
It took me 5 months to understand RSS feeds, this video does an amazing job of explaining it in under 5 minutes.
Luckily the folks at Wired are on the case and have assembled an amazing graphic on this article – The Life Cycle of Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You – that shows all of the places that a blog post goes. I think that this graphic does a great job of showing how a blog can help to share your information with many different audiences.

Thanks to the efforts of Jim Russell and I’m sure many others, Erie PA will be hosting the first “Rust Belt” blog summit which hopefully will provide an opportunity for ongoing linkages and collaborations in the future.

Hopefully the people behind great Pittsburgh blogs like:

The Pittsburgh Metroblog
Pittsburgh Dish
Iheart Pittsburgh
Burgh Diaspora
Pittsblog
Pittsburgh Comet
Tube City Almanac
Null Space
Walking Pittsburgh
Bike Pittsburgh Blog
Etc……

Will get to meet the folks behind blogs like

Fix Buffalo Today
The Detroit Metroblog
Defend Youngstown
Outside Erie
Cool Cleveland
Brewed Fresh Daily
Buffalo Rising
Buffalo Pundit
I Will Shout Youngstown
In The Yo
girl in the D
Absolute Michigan
International Metropolis
And new projects like GLUE

I also hope there’s room for the people behind concepts that are not strictly blogs like

POP City
Detroit Yes
Model D

It’s not till July so pass the word around.

(The blogs listed have not all agreed to be represented– It’s just a list of some potential participants)

I think I can say this is one of the most interesting uses of YouTube I have ever seen. The Tribune Review mentioned that the Sutterville fire department (located in Westmoreland County) has a video on YouTube of what they do each year. In the past 10 years, I have watched 2 different buildings burn from significant fire – check out pictures from Harris Grill Fire last summer here. Additionally, firemen and police officers are the ones that we count on to respond to some of the most horrific events, accidents and tragedies. I know there has been some frustration in Pittsburgh over the fire fighters contracts but I do have a level of respect for the people that are willing to help out with some of the worst situations that the rest of us never have to deal with.

So here is the video, well music video, of some of the things that the Sutterville Fire Department works on. I would love to hear more about how they decided to put together the video.

Well I know it has been a bit since my last post here. During this Christmas holiday I discovered the Scrabulous application on Facebook and my computer time has been transformed. Instead of blogging about interesting and important news in Pittsburgh, I spend my time figuring out how to create a 50 point word out of the letters X C Y and O. I have learned lots of new (and possibly useless words) and I have almost memorized the handy list of 2 letter words. I know now that QI is a real word meaning “variants of chi” – not sure when I will need to use the word QI in a sentence or even how to pronounce QI.
If you do not have a profile on Facebook, never fear there is an online version you can play outside of Facebook at Scrabulous.com.

I wanted to write about Scrabulous and see if there was any interest in an online Scrabble tournament here in Pittsburgh. However, My word building life was brought to a grinding halt today when I received an email with a link to this article in it from one of my friends who now also loves Scrabulous too.

Facebook asked to pull Scrabulous

So the Scrabble people are feeling a little threatened by all of the Facebook word building fun. I am not sure how I feel about this. While I understand the concern, I tend to think that all of the popularity that has developed around Scrabulous has got to be good for Scrabble business. There is quite a Scrabble following right here in Pittsburgh – click here to see my post on IheartPGH about local Scrabble clubs.

The very specific map known as Google Street View, represented here by a Post-Gazette mockup. Apparently they couldn’t figure out how to copy one of the real pictures either. It shows us what our streets look like. Here, for instance, is the beer distributor where I work. Here is the other beer distributor where I also work.

The Post-Gazette is kind enough to allay the fears of the nonagenarians who make up their core readership and believe that young people can perform magic with their computers and such:

Street View is not, as some might fear, real-time video. Pulling up a view of Downtown will not show people walking down Smithfield Street — the “Simpsons” episode in which Marge Simpson accidentally spies a naked Homer on a hammock got it wrong.

I want naked people on hammocks! Get to work, Google nerds!

Brief Update: As I looked more closely at this picture, I realized that the Post-Gazette graphics department seems to think that the opposite of west is also west. I guess that explains how they ended up doing newspaper art: once you fail out of cartography school, there are few other options.

I meant to do a post about this when I found it a while back. Downtown Pittsburgh, now has at least one resident blogger with a blog about life downtown. It’s not too active, but it does help show some signs of life.

About a year and a half ago, I found this amazing website called Detroit Yes!The site was obviously founded as a labor of love by people eager to document what was left of their city and it quickly became a place for people to talk about their memories of Detroit and what they can do to make the city great again. For a while I was on the Detroit Yes forums a lot, they seemed to be a place where the huge Detroit diaspora could meet to talk about the city. A lot of the people posting and commenting no longer lived in the area, but they were eager to share the things they learned by living in other places.

“The DetroitYES project began with the 1996 launch of the “Fabulous Ruins of Detroit” tour.This guided tour of the contemporary ruins of Detroit is accompanied by brief notes which, woven together, tell the story of precipitous decline and agonizing path of the great city of Detroit in the late 20th Century.

Along away the visitor will discover a snapshot of the ruins of Detroit in the mid 1990’s meant to stimulate and energize discussion of the questions, “What went wrong?” and “Where to do we go from Here?”

The “Classic Tour” forms the core of the DetroitYES project, an endeavor that has grown to over 2000 pages and has become home the most active forum for the discussion of Detroit, its problems and its promise -
The Discuss Detroit Forum.

You are invited and encouraged to share your memories, questions and observations with the millions who now visit this site and participate its discussion forums.”