SCN: websites to feature

[patrick]

Yes, it seems that the mission of SCN is to serve the community, the
local community. The organizations who want hosting on SCN and those
who want to be listed on SCN are the users. The other users of the
community are those who want to find such local community resources
on SCN.

SCN has some very neat sites hosted and listed. Who would have known
that there was a sundial web site? I can go to SCN, browse, and find
a site on sundials, print out the site and visit sundials in the area
that are open for public display.

SCN is a nice place to go to. A nice starting point for local events
and organizations and information. Seattle Insider is nice, but it
feels so corporate, so sterile, as if there is no personal touch to
it. The same goes for other local directory sites.

SCN has a real personal touch to it that is quite evident. There is
nothing like it. You can see volunteers' fingerprints all over it,
and that makes all the difference.

Patrick

As a note: If SCN were to only feature sites that were only hosted on
SCN, I may think it was being exclusive and think twice about going
there. If I have in mind that SCN is democratic to all listed and
hosted sites, then that makes a positive difference with me.

--- Rod Clark <bb615 at scn.org> wrote:
> Terry Trimingham wrote:
> > In my opinion, we need to promote SCN and all the cool stuff
> > it does.
> 
> Terry, 
> 
>    Which "cool stuff" do people (that is, the general public)
> really think of, when they think of SCN? 
> 
>    Two of the areas that people considered the "coolest" (which
> is to say, they were areas of SCN that demonstrably grew in
> popularity during 2000) were Web hosting for nonprofits and our
> growing audience for the variety of local information offered on
> the SCN home page. 
> 
>    Unfortunately, both of those have become declining areas this
> year. Our text-only dialup is used less and less. Few people use
> SCN for personal Web sites because it's so difficult compared to
> other choices. So our "cool" factor rests on fewer distinctions
> these days than it might.
> 
>    But we do still have one other cool thing - the Community
> menus that embrace a wide range of people's local interests and
> concerns. SCN is well known for that, and it has a lot to do
> with why people might still think SCN is "cool," even though
> practically everything else about SCN has lost any semblance of
> leadership in its field. The Community menus and the matching
> focus of the 2000-era SCN home page were the two things that the
> Seattle Times cited when it included SCN as an "essential"
> Seattle site in its survey of the 100 most essential Web sites
> in the summer of 2000.
> 
>    The new leadership of SCN did away with one of those
> sucesses, and now I hear people proposing to do away with the
> other and more important one, the Community menus. Shouldn't we
> try to keep a sense of our connection to the whole city, and
> realize that that's what has attracted most of the good regard
> that people have for SCN?
> 
> > For that reason, I think we should concentrate on SCN sites.
> > It is not that there isn't anything else good out there, it is
> > just that we need to beat our own drum as much as we can.
> 
>    That's a recipe for limiting our audience to a small number
> of people. That's like KING 5 not mentioning any community
> issues except from those organizations hosted on
> hometeamcommunity.com. For any media site with an overall
> community purpose to do that is really counterproductive, both
> in terms of attracting a sizable audience and in terms of
> reaching out to people who haven't historically had Web sites on
> SCN - such as the black community and others who need to be
> included in whatever dialog, communications and public
> understanding we hope to promote in a more effective way among
> people in Seattle.
> 
> > I also happen to agree with Lois about not wanting to promote
> > sites that our basic users can't even access because they
> > don't follow SCN web guidelines. That just doesn't make sense.
> > I know a few folks that still only use lynx, SCN has always
> > been kind to lynx users.
> 
>    SCN's own pages are accessible in Lynx, and always should be.
> But only a fraction of a percent of our site's viewers use Lynx.
> We can't simply ignore most of the Internet just because the
> only browser that SCN provides is so obsolete that almost no one
> uses it anymore. Even people who use SCN's Lynx can go to a
> library to see the many local sites on our menus as they are
> intended to be seen.
> 
>    It is the information content of Seattle area sites, not
> their technical use of certain HTML tags, that has guided
> content selection for SCN's menus and for the home page for the
> past several years. It's harmful to the wider interests of
> people throughout our city to take such a step backwards as to
> limit people's knowledge to a small amount of content based on
> outdated technical grounds.
> 
> Rod Clark
> webeditors@#scn.org
> 
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