In conjunction with the Technically Philly open data grant project, our Technically Media Inc. parent company has moved into a working office space at Temple University Center City at 1515 Market Street in Philadelphia.

It’s important to note that this office space is specifically for the six-month Technically Philly grant project, and so the office is used for those purposes and is only leased for that time.

It’s also important to note that we at TP take great interest in respecting, honoring and, in some ways, continuing the traditions of the past.

Having a flask on your desk isn’t about being drunk all the time, it’s about honoring Bob Woodward’s old saying: “All good work is done in defiance of management.”

Short of stereotypes of any order, journalists are close to the ground — regardless of whether we’re covering the war in Afghanistan or the school board — but we take great pride in remaining fiercely independent.

A flask — or the whiskey and beer and the cussing and the industry aphorisms — go right along with our interest in asking relevant, important questions. Or so we think. (Yes, delusions of self-importance also seem to be a journalism staple)

Come in and see the office, and we can have a drink while we talk it over.

In June, I introduced Story Shuffle, the themed, first-person storytelling event.

Two months later, we hosted a second, as per our every other month schedule for the friendly story sharing night. We’re shooting to host the third in September. It’s ready to grow, so now is when we invite big shots like Eric Smith.

The theme was AUTHORITY.

Listen to mine here or the others here.

In addition to our RSS feed, you can follow Story Shuffle on Twitter and Facebook.

I like projects.

I enjoy pointing out skills, traits, knowledge sets or the like that I lack and want to develop and finding practical, fun, realistic ways to develop them as best I can — in small, attainable steps.

I love storytelling.

I want to be a better, more captivating, more experienced storyteller. I also bought a house back in December and was hunting a more original way to christen it.

With that in mind, a couple Saturdays ago, I introduced Story Shuffle to a dozen friends, mostly a cohort of former colleagues from my college newspaper days. It’s something of a themed, first-person storytelling event with lots of tasty food.

Every few months, I hope to help coordinate such an event, at my home or others, in which everyone comes prepared with a 5-15 minute story based around a common theme — the order of which are chosen randomly with a shuffled deck of cards. The first theme was ‘Beginnings,’ and featured 10 stories.

After each session, I’ll be posting once a day the audio of all those stories told that night. (Grab the RSS feed here).

I’ll also occasionally post storytelling tips or videos I come across and perhaps other recorded stories I come across or record.

The point, of course, being the beauty of storytelling from anyone.

Read more here and listen to my first story here.

I haven’t totally flipped. I maintain — for now — the stance that, until sponsorships or other ways to monetize full-text feeds are in place, NEast Philly and Technically Philly, as we announced in October, should keep their partial feeds. It comes down to this duality I see.

(1) If you’re trying to monetize content then, by all means, make me click through. Offer summary enough for me to decide if the story or post is worth my time, but I understand accurate metrics of on-site traffic are vital to sell against advertising and other engagement-driven sponsorships.

(2) If monetizing your content is not a primary objective, then, chances are, you’re more interested in accruing, growing and retaining the largest audience possible. That means you need to limit the obstacles.

So, in feed readers and e-mail blasts and on mobile devices, content on this site no longer requires you to click through to the site. I just hope you’ll read.

Perhaps what would bring you through to click would be to comment or, yes, to “like” the story with the new Facebook integration that even I’m toying with. Admittedly, this site is less about engagement than sharing thoughts, but I thought I’d try to wrap my mind around the power of the universal Facebook tool.

Your work and experiences with Back on My Feet will be more meaningful than this cat's, I swear.

I hate unpaid internships. I think they suck.

So I’m going to make the one I’m offering as meaningful as I possibly can.

Since January, I’ve worked for homeless running and opportunity-development nonprofit Back on My Feet. Homeless advocacy nonprofits aren’t known for being flush with cash. You can decide whether they’re even legal and what they say about our organization.

But the rules are a little bit different in the mission-orientated nonprofit world. I am the first in this role, creating what the media and marketing department of ours should look like.

And already, it’s time to bring on an intern this summer to help me with my role as Director of Media and Social Marketing in our Center City Philadelphia headquarters at 15th and Locust streets. The good news is that because I hate so much being unable to pay an intern, I’m looking to make it a meaningful learning experience.

See the formal Content and Media internship description here, but the short of it is that I’ll be looking for someone sharp and engaged and interested in social advocacy, the Web and content.

You’ll work with me on creating community and audience building via social media, including our yet to be officially released blog. I’ll be expecting 15-20 hours a week, but for the right candidate, I’m going to be flexible in time and space.

So, contact me already or spread the word.

[Updated: URL is dead, now go here.]

With a bit of a twinkle in our eyes, my colleagues Brian James Kirk and Sean Blanda, today, we launch a small testament to our love for that city that lives in Philadelphia’s historic shadow: New York.

Today, we launch the 67th ward.

It’s not much now and probably won’t be in the future. Just a small landing page for a mentality.

Yes, it comes from that old New York Times trend story that chronicled — in a somewhat condescending tone — the young people from that city, particularly Brooklyn, who were migrating to old transitioning neighborhoods of Philadelphia.

Philadelphia, the story suggested, was the ‘next borough’ so the ‘sixth borough.’

Gosh that just seemed stupid and so very representative of how difficult it is for most of us to take hold of the gravity of time. New York City was the engine of urban power in this country since the Second World War, with increasing dominance in the last 25 years, and that is quite indisputable.

But that city and its paper of record could certainly use a level of humility, particularly with regard to the once Workshop of the World. Particularly considering New York has won itself so much praise and acclaim that is just frankly played out. Cliche, my friends, runs deep in any sentence you utter about your travails there.

Philadelphia has the wonderful magic, grit and striking chance for recapturing that excited so many in so many corners of New York. So it made perfect sense to make clear who was in what place.

Historically and perhaps once again in the future, New York would be cast in its older brother’s shadow.

So in casual conversation, I started using the phrase to describe the cit to the north. Then I slipped it into a few Technically Philly stories, and we actually heard back from readers who got a kick out of it. So we used it more.

No anger here, I have nothing but love for the 67th ward.

Wards aren’t the teeniest political divisions in the city, but something about the ward system is the most Philadelphian.

Maybe it’s the ugly realities of street money and machine politics or perhaps the more beautiful aspects of a city still possessive of neighborhoods as divided and varied, different, troubled and tight-knit as the best and oldest cities always have been. Whatever the reason, it sure seems like Philadelphia has a lot to remind its neighbor 90 miles north along the Jersey Turnpike.

New York is going to get through all of this. It just needs to follow the lead of its older brother, Philadelphia, and its much maligned, corrupted and bureaucratic political ward system, fitting for both of our municipal histories.

The sidebar from Yahoo Pipes that replaces “New York” with “the 67th ward” in various news stories and a small passage is just a small landing page to convey that feeling.

Indeed, the over-heightened echo chamber of circular praise and obsessive coverage and conversation on those now familiar Web-based tools stem from their truly trans-formative power.

I’ve taken an interest in all of that. Enough so that, in addition to the conferences at which I’ve spoken, conversations I’ve had and now the full-time job I enjoy, from time to time I’ve been asked to walk others through the good of what social media can have.

A lot of times, the requests come from or are on behalf of small business owners who keep hearing that these damn Internet buzz companies are going to help them make more money. Often times, they don’t know how, don’t want to try or are too turned off by the schmaltz and self-styled gurus to even think it’s for them.

That’s good. I think that’s all lame, too. It’s an opportunity to speak like a real person and keep it all appropriately relative. Facebook and Twitter and blogging are not important, but they can be important for promoting something you love to do, which, in turn, is important.

So, I’m happy to announce that, next month I’ve been asked to lead a small teleconferencing course called ‘Basic Blogging for Business.’

Below, I share some of the details of this and a similar class I taught with the same group in the fall.

My class is the third in a four part series designed for small business owners without a lick of knowledge about plopping onto the Web and using social media to promote what they do.

The cost is $129. See all class descriptions here, and register here.

My 90-minute course’s description:

Basic Blogging for Business.

Monday, March 8 @ 8 p.m.

Less than 10 years old and already, blogging is a force in the marketing, promotion and customer development sphere. In this class, taught by an experienced blogger well-versed in brand building online, we’ll go over why a small business should have a blog, how much work it really requires and the absolute basics of getting started, like choosing a platform and making your first post. We’ll also touch on tools that’ll make your blog more dynamic and worth returning to.

In November, with the same group, I taught a class on incorporating multimedia in existing WordPress platforms — basically a step above the class I’ll be teaching in March.

A month or so before that, I was approached — by way of a friend — by the woman who decided to put the courses together, mostly designed for a cohort of small business owners she knew and who had requested some training in the realm of social media.

It’s far and away from walking to a factory to make a widget, but I enjoy getting interested people started in anything, even if it is Web based.

Let me know if you have any questions.

You can now via e-mail, receive updates to this outlet for my professional work, experience as a young freelance writer and thoughts on what my future in news, writing and journalism might look like.

Also, you can submit your e-mail address to the box on the right sidebar and receive in your e-mail inbox what I post here. No spam, no clutter, no cost. Just these posts.

That is, of course, an alternative to subscribing to my RSS feed, which you can do here.

In case this RSS thing is still crazy and confusing, dig its explanation In Plain English below.

For more than eight months, NEast Philly, the online hub for Northeast Philadelphia news I introduced back in May, grew to a small, but targeted, 6,000 monthly page views, housed on a free template from WordPress.com.

Finally we have broken free. Yesterday we launched the brand new redesign of our neighborhood news site for the future.

No longer just a forwarding domain, NEastPhilly.com now aims to be the Web portal for content creation, aggregation and dissemination of news, views, information and events happening in Northeast Philadelphia, a middle-class, still print-reliant community. We hope to recapture our traffic numbers from the old site quickly and move far beyond them.

If you’re interested in the geography or another online news startup find a voice, audience and value, grab the RSS feed here.

What’s more, it’ll also be another experiment in establishing a small, self-supporting local news product. Unlike the Technically Philly product I co-founded that is a swing at a high-end, double niche, NEast is a decidedly more modest proposal.

Aggregate all the news on the Web, build on it with perspective and original reporting to create a one-of-a-kind audience based around a geographic locale, just like the small-town newspapers are that are faring a bit better than their big metro counterparts. The work is spearheaded by Shannon McDonald, while I (try to) handle its Web faculties and write occasionally, like other weekly contributors. We are a fine beginning to a product built for the coming years, I think.

This new incarnation of NEast carries the same content and the neighborhood-centric organization of the old, with the greater versatility of a self-hosted product, in addition to, yes, the very purposefuly chosen advertising space of this altered-Wordpress theme.

This industry needs experimentation, no? So, we launched TPhilly.com, and NEast and, as I introduced last month, health-care-related personal story site MyPICCLine.com.

We hope to keep overhead low, rely on user generated content, automation and occasional contributors to abut our professional reporting, and slowly build out from advertising beginnings to other revenue models.

But first, we need to build traffic and further brand recognition in the Northeast, bootstrapping all the way. It’s a long build, but I look forward to being a part of it. This is fine part-time work for now.

I am quite young, as are almost all of the others with whom I conspire in projects like this. But we’re in a period of great change in the news and information business. So, while I pay the bills by freelancing, I see no better obsession than trying to create additional work opportunities with small, niche media organizations for the future. Get the business plans out.

We can at least admit that the new version of NEast is a big step from the old one depicted below, right?

Any advice? Any likes or dislikes?

The older, WordPress.com version of this site.

Well this is overdue.

Exactly 575 days after my first post on this incarnation of ChristopherWink.com, I’ve done a massive redesign. If you’re in a feed reader, come on over and browse.

There is so much left for me to do, though. A lot of usability, design and organization elements remain janky. We’ll get to that. For now, I wanted to get over the big introduction hurdle of the redesign.

Of course, when I say redesign, I mean I switched from a free WordPress.com theme to using a free, self-hosted WordPress theme, but, hey, I’m tweaking this baby up.

It’s a slightly bold step forward.

Thanks to Sean Blanda, my friend, colleague and fellow co-founder of Technically Philly, who offered a good deal on hosting. There’s a lot of work left to be done for the transition, but for now it sure looks a bit more professional, no? I’ll be going through an overhaul of my portfolio, some of my site’s organization and certainly delving into greater, more detailed metrics. I also look forward to all the normal fun you can have on a normal, self-hosted site. All that said, I don’t intend on straying from my usual focus here, writing on being a young freelance journalist and (very) small time Web entrepreneur.

More to follow on the transition. But, for now, let me know what you think about the theme, called OneRoom. But yeah, please, don’t go and take it.