Thursday, June 12, 2014

What is Nhv.Org all About?

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Classic Car Today on Whitney Avenue. 
We knock it out of the park for you on Instagram on a regular basis here at Nhv.Org; at least we try. Follow our channel at Instagram.Com/NhvOrg for neat pictures all taken in and around New Haven which are meant to be historically relevant to some degree, aesthetically pleasing, and perhaps anthropologically meaningful.

Instagram is one of many new features of the internet. As a platform, it began in 2010 and has risen to become one of the best ways of sharing on the web. Last year, it grew 23% compared to Facebook, which grew at 3%. We like it too, which is why carefully curated content is added to our feed, just about every day.

We cover events with it, as well as promote things that are happening around the city, as a way of increasing attendance to to those events by making them look perhaps a little more inviting, cool and exciting; especially things that take place on the Green, the Public Library, as well as free events at Yale which are open to the public.


What about the Content?
Nhv.Org posts just about anything, as long as it's interesting and relevant to New Haven, Connecticut. We even share access to post with different organizations such as Neighborhood Music School, the NHFPL, local arts organization SiteProjects, and citizens with an interest in posting. We promote quality local blogs like New Haven Speaks and the New Haven Beat, tweeting anything they post, using the automated power of RSS.  We also provide video support for the New Haven Public School System, as well as private schools throughout the area.

As Lee Cruz of Greater New Haven Community Foundation said recently:
The truth is that the value and relevance of Nhv.Org as an organization continues to grow. It might be under-utilized in the sense that the public does not actively play with the publicly accessible map that we have offered, for example, and posting is done mainly by our editing staff (whereas the access is offered to verified members of the community), we think that the format and the vision could be the next step in an anticipated process of merger between social media and news.

Future of The Internet!
It's true. Facebook only grew 3% last year, and there are reasons for this. You, yourself, might have found that you did not add many friends because all of your friends are already on there, and you're already connected. Whereas when you first signed up for Facebook, you probably sought and added lots of your friends from all different areas of your life.

The truth about Facebook is that as a publicity platform, it is not quite reliable and can be unpredictable because of the selective algorithms that determine who sees what. The way that the content is curated can sometimes make it difficult to rely on, when you're trying to promote awareness of an event. Therefore, what we did was obtain a very simple and easy-to-remember domain name, which was inspired by the hashtag which many organizations in New Haven were using for their public information across platforms of social media which utilized the hashtag, namely Instagram and Twitter.

We then branched out into every direction of free tools we could find, implementing many of the embeddable widgets available on the web, to include whatever the public wanted to post about New Haven, by using the #nhv tag in their posts. Therefore, you don't even need to be a participant in Twitter or Instagram in order to benefit from reading Nhv.Org everyday. The content changes on a minute-by-minute basis (Hyper) and it's all about New Haven (Local). It's driven by social media, but we also curate content on other levels including Calendars and Maps.

Is Nhv.Org an Nonprofit or a Business?
Neither, actually! It's more of a social science experiment designed by multimedia agency Stereomedia. The goal is to determine what we can do with absolutely no investment, using self-taught skills and free tools from the web. So far, it's been great and the outcome has been amazing. New Haven, Connecticut is a city where things originate. What Nhv.Org stands to represent is a formula which organizes the way that people have gotten their news before, by providing it in a structure which still is evolving and continues to take shape. It is largely inspired by the feed of #nhv on Twitter, which incorporates instantaneous current information in one stream from every major organization in the city, including nonprofits like the Arts Council, City Government agencies such as the Health Department and the Library, Traffic and Parking, as well as City Hall; and also Yale, as well as regular citizens like ourselves.

For people who live in New Haven, it's a vital source of information to determine not just what's happening but what's going to happen. It's also more comprehensive and inclusive than checking any particular news source.

The Future Direction of the Platform
What happens next? We envision that there is a possibility that like the broadway musical "Oklahoma!" there is a chance that the Nhv.Org formula could become successful in some regards to the way that the public is informed in various localities around the nation. Places like Portland, ME; Northampton MA; the smaller cities where information is manageable in this format. We've also begun approaching the idea that a similar platform could be built for the music and arts subculture in different cities, too.