COMMUNITY JOURNALING ONLINE – NORTHBOARD v. 2.0 LET’S THE PEOPLE DECIDE

TRAVERSE CITY, MI – Traverse City Michigan based web design firm, colossalFirm and BrightBridge Studios, developers of Northboard.net, a web based community classified board and digital journal, announced a major upgrade allowing any community in the United States to create its own local version of the service with a single click. The local version provides every capability that the original Northboard provided with the addition of a new section called the Community Journal. The Community Journal is a wholly free section allowing users to post into new categories such as: Citizan Reporter, Recipes to Share, Photos, Poems, Things YOU Should Know, Local Heroes, Opinions, and many more. Users also have the power, through a single-click system called the ‘Keeper’, to determine which contents remain in the journal beyond the default 90 day expiration.

Northboard.net’s founder states that the goal is to provide any community that wants one an easy-to-use and easy-to-access journal where the contents reflect the community’s personality and history.

“The Community Journal is a place where anyone can share their interests, talents, opinions, and work, and any member of the community can ‘vote’ to keep that content available indefinitely. Things that don’t hold interest among the community will drop off, but things that the community values will remain, building up a critical mass of content over time that is a true reflection of a given community’s values and remains a more valuable resource for anyone interested in getting to know a community.”

Northboard.net is not intended to take the place of Craigslist, but rather to fill in the gaps where Criagslist is not available.

“If the Boston or Burlington Craigslist is too far away to be useful to the people of Putney, Vermont, they can create their own Northboard instantly and start using it right away. We’re set up now so that any community in the United States with a zip code can create their own Northboard, and we intend to add support for Canadian postal codes soon.”

Northboard.net was launched in its first version in June of 2005 offering free community classified ads to users in Northern Michigan. Since rolling out version 2.0 in February of this year, the service has grown to 87 local Northboards in 24 states.