Technically Philly directory launches, more updates to come

Today, Technically Philly has announced its directory.

Directories are normally pretty boring. We think ours won’t be.

It’s certainly a small step, but, leveraging WordPress custom taxonomies with some incredible thinking power of Sean Blanda and plenty of sweat equity from myself and Brian James Kirk, we have launched pages for the nearly 1,000 companies and almost as many individuals we’ve covered at Technically Philly in the past two years.

[I can’t overstate complimenting Sean on his leadership and creativity in launching this long plotted perspective. It helped to hear people excited about the idea at our Philly Startup Leaders Fishbowl back in March]

Let it be clear that this is a start, not a finish, as this directory has a lot of growth to come. Chief among future announcements will be its role in a membership and sponsorship platform. We just wanted to hear from people. Whatcha think?

Why we’re doing it:

• Revenue — As said above, the difference between a page looking like, say, this one and this one will be a membership/sponsorship cap to our revenue build. This is a long time in coming.
• Community — There is truly a value in creating landing pages for our content (and others). This is another big step in helping to connect this region’s technology community.

Why this matters:

• Its locality — For the same reason, that Cityfile and Crunchbase work despite the powers of Wikipedia, newspaperdotcom directories and others in the crowded market, locality in a community wins. We’ll rank well in search for many of those in our directory. We have some unique features to come too, so this is a distinctly Philadelphia product.
• Its connective spirit — you just might see this being the fabric of a bigger push to connect independent publishers in Philadelphia.

What’s to come?

• Sustainability — We roll out a membership platform for individuals and sponsorship model for businesses to update and have greater control of their pages.
• More Content — We still have lots of holes in the logos, headshots and descriptions to start. We also will try to tie in feeds to Wikipedia for the bigger names in the directory to keep this project alive.
• Process transparency — Sean Blanda speaks at Wordcamp Philly this Saturday to talk about the process and will surely write up the details on that blog of his.