This little neighborhood blog is part of a much larger project. We spend most of our time developing the software that runs this site and others like it. In fact, we launched Central District News back in October of 2007 as the original beta site for a product that became Neighborlogs, which allows anyone to set up their own easy-to-manage place-based, revenue-generating community website.

For about seven months we’ve been working on another big project to bring these tools plus new, more advanced ones to a different market. It’s called InstiNews and targets large professional news organizations. The goal is to bring our pervasive community tools, geo-location, and self-service advertising system to the traditional news world.

As Andrew mentioned earlier, today one of the first sites on that platform launched, with a radically redesigned site for Seattle PostGlobe. They’re some of the folks who were recently laid off with the demise of the print version of the Seattle PI. And for the last several months they’ve been working hard to take charge of their own future by applying their pro journalism skills to a web-only regional news effort. We feel really lucky to be a small part of that and to help them succeed in their mission.

Like all of our other sites, the new PostGlobe is community-enabled from the ground up. You can use your existing Central District News account to log in there and post comments, full news stories, upload photos or videos, or create discussion topics. The editors of the site will be watching for your contributions, and will promote the best stuff to the front page of the site.  I’ll be making an occasional contribution there too, as we often run across stories with a wider audience than just the Central District, as occurred with the Genesee plane landing earlier today.

We’ve got several other cool newspaper sites in the pipeline too – they’re still under wraps but should be out in the next month. Stay tuned…