I have big news to share with you.

The Chicago Community Trust has announced it's awarding me $35,000 to fund improvements and new development to Windy Citizen.  The trust also announced awards around that same amount to 11 other Chicago-based news organizations and non-profits including Gapers Block, the Beachwood
Reporter, the Chicago News Cooperative and more.

I'm not yet ready to announce exactly how we're going to use the funding, but expect news on that front soon. Our goals as always are to do a better job helping Chicagoans find the best stuff in the city today.

In the meantime, I want to thank the Chicago Community Trust for having the courage to hand out this funding to startups and new initiatives instead of holding on to it for in house efforts.  The funding was originally awarded to them to start a new local news  organization in Chicago.  I'd heard rumors about this and didn't think it was a great idea.  In August, when they announced they'd decided to change tacks and give the money away, Knight News Challenge-style, my respect for them shot up quite a bit.  New ideas need support to make an impact.  It's great to see one of Chicago's most respected institutions siding with the upstarts.

And I want to thank every Windy Citizen for your support over the last year.  Every vote, every submission, every comment has been a great encouragement to me, our interns, our bloggers, and everyone pulling for us.  It wasn't so long ago that I was asking you to chip in as a micropatron to help keep the site up for a few more months.  Those days are behind us for the most part.  Now it's time to focus on taking Windy Citizen from 100,000 unique visitors per month and 3000ish users to 4-500,000 visitors/month and 15,000 users.  We'll get there folks.  We'll get there.

Thanks for your support of Windy Citizen.

We've got a thread going on the awards over here.  Please stop by and
help us aggregate any coverage of the announcement and discuss the other winners.  There are definitely a few worth scrutinizing.

Recently the Lincoln Park Zoo posted a wish list of equipment and items it needs for its animals.

Among the many items on that list were "nesting enclosures" for the zoo's red pandas. i.e. private spaces where they can get intimate and make babies.

Windy Citizen KiyoshiMartinez thought it'd be fun to help raise money to buy these two enclosures for the Zoo at $163 each and started a thread here on Windy Citizen about the effort.

I set up a paypal account and a widget to monitor our progress, Chicagoist wrote a post about it also, and by late afternoon, all $363 had been raised via contributions from 15 donors.

The folks at the Zoo were thrilled.  You can find them on Windy Citizen now right here.

Great job everyone.

Happy Monday, everyone!

We've been on quite a roll lately with advertisers and sponsorships here at Windy Citizen.  There are a few reasons for that, which I hope to say more about in a future post, but for now, know that solid growth of the community here on the WC is attracting some very interesting advertisers.  In August we had The Fresh Diet support us for a full month while September saw Chicago Now sponsor Windy Citizen for two weeks.

This week sees the launch of a spot from Friends of Dan Hynes, who are putting out the word that Illinois Comptroller Dan Hynes is running for Governor of Illinois.

We've provided Friends of Dan Hynes with a real-time ad spot in the sidebar of all pages on the Windy Citizen.  It shows his latest Twitter update and includes links to his Twitter and Facebook pages.   The spot updates in real-time, so you can follow Hyne's campaign from the front page of the Windy Citizen.

We will also be pulling news updates from the Hynes' campaign's blog into our upcoming story feed.  You'll see these posts demarcated with a red "syndicated" tag that appears by the dateline on the story.

I think the ad spot looks great and feedback from the WCers who've pinged me about it has been very positive.  Informational advertising is lightyears beyond standard banner advertising.  Our goal is to provide the community with useful information from interesting people looking to reach Chicagoans.

You may be seeing more campaign advertising on the WC in the next few months.  I've received a handful of inquiries that we're considering carefully.

Just four months ago we ran a 1-week fundraiser to help keep the lights on at the Windy Citizen.  What a difference, eh?

Hi, Windy Citizens,

I'm excited to announce that ChicagoNow.com, the new local blog network from The Tribune Company will be sponsoring Windy Citizen for the next two weeks. 

About Chicago Now:

ChicagoNow.com is a new local web site that provides a place for
Chicagoans to find the best blogs on topics that appeal to their
passions and interests. At ChicagoNow.com, you'll find blogs by a
Chicago cop, a former White Sox pitcher, a divorce lawyer, a chef, a
stand-up comic, a socialite and much more!

You'll be seeing the latest posts from some of Chicago Now's best blogs on the Citizen during this time including Breaking Tweets Chicago (helmed by former Windy Citizen blogger Craig Kanally), Dennis Byrne's Barber Shop and several more.

---------

Windy Citizen offers one-week sponsorshops to businesses and organizations looking to reach Chicagoans, putting your latest news and announcements in a place where Chicagoans can find them and take action.  To learn more, click here.

One of the things that make Windy Citizen unique is our reputation system or "clout" system. As members take action on the site, they earn clout points to distinguish them from other users who may be less active.

Today I'm rolling out a few changes to how we calculate clout that I want to tell you about. You may notice your clout score looking very different from what it looked like just yesterday.

Before today, any time someone voted on a story, whether they voted it up or down, they received a clout point. And any time they posted a comment or a story, they received a clout point. That's it. Clout scores, thus, reflected how many actions people were taking on the site, rather than the quality of those actions.

Starting today, clout will be based on two things, how many points the stories you've submitted have received, and how many points the comments you've submitted have received. We've not yet rolled out the voting buttons for comments, but will be shortly.

This change is retroactive, meaning your current clout score reflects how many votes your stories have received up to this day. Soon it will also reflect votes on your comments as well.

This change is an important step in making for better posts, better discussions, and a better front page on the Windy Citizen. If a person has a lot of clout, that means they've posted stories and comments that others found interesting and worth reading. Up until now, a members clout score simply reflected that they were voting on a lot of stories.

Scores should be recalculating over the course of the day. I've recalculated the top 20 members or so individually to see how the re-scoring has affected them.

Some have lost a great deal of clout. Some have gained a great deal of clout. Many have stayed about the same.

Making a change like this to a young, growing community is less than ideal, but it's a trigger that's best pulled sooner rather than later.

The last 8 months have seen a great deal of growth in our community and the quality of discussions happening here, but there's still a lot of work to be done to get the Citizen to where it needs to be so we can pull in a much larger community of Chicagoans while keeping the place interesting.

As always, thanks for your patience and support. With our new scoring system, people will be rewarded for sharing good stuff on the site. Quality rather than quantity will win out. This is how it should have been from day one, but technical difficulties slowed me from implementing it.

Onward.