Metrocascade: a new website of Victoria blogs

A new one-stop shop for all of the blogs about Victoria, including the Times Colonist, was launched recently at Metrocascade.com. Alongside a whole bunch of blogs I didn’t know about, Metrocascade includes Michelle Kirby, Sean Holman’s Public Eye Online and Bernard van Schulmann, all fairly well known. The site itself has a blog, which apparently puts the start as early February, probably why I only saw the first visitors to my site yesterday. It is great to see more websites devoted to our little part of the world and I will be following this one quite closely.

5 thoughts on “Metrocascade: a new website of Victoria blogs”

  1. Hi Corey, thanks for the mention! I’m 1/3 of MetroCascade – we’re pretty small right now, but the idea is to create an aggregator of hyper-local news and events (and photos, we’re still rolling out features, etc.), all based on what I call “the google model” (that is, we provide the links, and then send you away to those sites – the idea is that it generates more traffic for the sites we link to).

    Please tell your friends & colleagues who blog, or your friends / colleagues who have projects that are Victoria related, to use the “suggest news” button in the top right quadrant of MetroCascade’s front page. They’ll be asked for the url, the author’s name if they know it, perhaps a quick note, your email (which won’t be published or used, of course). Right now we’re at the hand-coding stage – so someone will look the suggestion over, and if it’s not hate speech or p^rn, we add it to the “cascade.” As I mentioned on Bernard’s blog’s comments board, we’re not gatekeepers (except to keep hate speech & p^rn out).

    There’s a fair bit of political commentary right now and some tech, but I’m hoping that we’ll get more people from the arts community to create blogs, even if only to publish the occasional pointer to an art show, or to theatre or music performances, etc. There is so much going on in Victoria – often below the radar. MetroCascade is supposed to be a platform, so we can see one another in all our diversity!

  3. No, we didn’t go with existing systems. We built MetroCascade from scratch, using Ruby on Rails. (I see PlanetPlanet is built using Python. Another friend tried to get us to use Drupal – Placeblogger uses that, too – but Werner & Helmut knew they wanted to build this in Ruby.)

    The aggregation part isn’t hard to do anyway, it’s the UI and then figuring out the community aspect – like, getting the right mix, participants, etc. – that’s intriguing (and not so easy to just push a button for!) 🙂

    For the events listing (which is still under construction), we’ll have some interesting new code for scraping listings, which I believe we’re putting out into the open source community. I’m not a coder myself (wish I were, sometimes), but from what I’m seeing, this part of the technology will be quite new/ useful.

    We’ll see how it all progresses – it’s a work in progress for sure!

  4. The real model / inspiration for this is Outside.in (http://outside.in/), which is venture capital financed and has a healthy-sized team of developers who are cranking out incredible features (like Radar). We’re boot-strapped, unfunded, and a 2.6 person shop, so things go a little more slowly.

    I’m FB/ Twitter/ LinkedIn friends with the founder at OutsideIn and with one of the NYC-based VCs who invested in Brooklyn, NY-based OutsideIn – a couple of years ago, I asked if they’re coming to Canada, but they said, “eventually, but not yet.” At that point, I thought, “well, if they DO come to Canada, what are the chances they’ll capture Victoria? Zero. They’ll start in the T-dot, maybe do Montreal, possibly Vancouver – and Victoria will be ignored again. So let’s see if we can build it ourselves.” Hence MetroCascade.

  5. Hello!
    Very Interesting post! Thank you for such interesting resource!
    PS: Sorry for my bad english, I’v just started to learn this language 😉
    See you!
    Your, Raiul Baztepo

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