The local Downsville political blog Uppity Wisconsin  has been selected as the Wisconsin member of the Democratic Convention State Blogging Corps.  

Uppity Wisconsin will live blog directly from the floor of the Democratic Convention. The members of the state blogging corps were announced this morning by Howard Dean in a web video.

Note - Steve Hanson, publisher of the Chippewa Guide is also the editor of Uppity Wisconsin, and will be a major part of the Uppity Wisconsin reporting team in Denver. 

The Chippewa Guide is in the Leader-Telegram today, with a nice article about what we're doing here.

 Look for the "Best Of The Valley" information mentioned in the article in the next few weeks.  You'll get  a chance to tell us about your favorite businesses, restaurants, and other favorite places in the Chippewa Valley soon.

Well - that's interesting. It looks like YouTube has disappeared off the Internet this morning. At first I thought I was seeing some sort of weird fallout from our server maintenance last night -- but the reason you're not seeing any YouTube videos on the site today is that it appears that YouTube is temporarily dead. Which is --- odd, to say the least. WELL - They're back --- apparently reports are that this was a world-wide outage - at least their DNS stopped working altogether. I don't think this is the same as the failure they had in February caused by Pakistan being a little over-zealous in blocking them.

Those of you who've been around for a while on the site know that we used to have a classified ads system.  We took it off after the company that we were contracting with for the classifieds went out of business. 

We're planning on bringing the classifieds back. Some time in the middle of May, we'll have classifieds available on the site again.  These will be completely local and for the time being at least will not be sent out to any other web sites. But they will be free.  We will have a range of different classifications, and will probably expand those as time goes on.

So - look for the free classifieds on the Chippewa Guide in a few weeks. 

We want to know what's happening in the Chippewa Valley so that we can tell everyone else.  Know of a great upcoming event?  A favorite restaurant?  An interesting story about something that is going on?  Let us know. 

We're also looking for anyone who'd like to write about the Chippewa Valley.  We'll offer a blog to anyone who can convince us that they have something interesting to say - just let us know. 

You can send press releases, or any other information to us with the contact form at the top of the guide, or just email us at sales [at] chippewaguide [dot] com.

Keep in touch!

Here at the farm we've been being pelted with an astounding amount of spam backscatter for the last week or so - at levels I've never seent.  Now we know why.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/07/kraken_botnet_menace/ 

We're on the lookout for web sites in the Chippewa Valley.  If you have a favorite site, or you publish a site, let us know.  If the site has an RSS feed and you'd like to see it aggregated in with our Local Blogs section, that's even better.

In general, if you know about anything interesting going on in the Chippewa  Valley, we want to know about it and spread the word.  So please fee free to send us anything of interest through the contact form, or just email us at sales [at] chippewaguide [dot] com

Keep in touch! 

Yeah, I know we've been promising it for a while, but the photo contest is finally in the works.

Chippewa Guide is going to be starting a photo contest on April 1. It's not an April Fools joke, it's real.

The idea is that this will be a totally on-line photo contest. You'll upload your pictures to the web site, and we will have an on-line competition. You will be able to upload your photos starting on April 1, and running through April 30. On May 1 we will open the contest to judging. On June 1 we will announce the prize winners. You'll be able to rate the pictures and leave comments on them. There will be several different categories of photos, and each category will have it's own prize. There will also be a grand prize of a $50 gift certificate from the Eau Claire or Menomonie Chamber of Commerce, good at any Chamber of Commerce merchant.

We're playing with a new look here. Every so often we'll re-design the site, and tonight's the night. Let us know what you think on the new poll.

I've started some initial attempts at community building around the BarCamp Chippewa idea. There's a post on Chippewa Guide, and I've sent out some emails. I've also set up a mailing list, and have started an organic group here. Lastly, there is also a preliminary outline page on the BarCamp Wiki.

More to follow. Stay tuned.