The “town websites” as they were collectively called during the meeting include:
- www.Longmeadow.org
This website is the only “official” town website. It was created by group of volunteer residents led by Jim Moran during the summer/fall of 1997. Over the past 13 years it has grown to become an important resource for our town. There is not much information about our town that cannot be found on www.longmeadow.org/.
The Town of Longmeadow pays only for the web hosting and annual domain name registration that is valued at estimated $100/ year. Jim Moran provides ~90% of the daily effort required in order to make sure that the posted information is timely and frequently updated. Mark Gold provides the other 10%. "Volunteer” time required for annual maintainance/ upgrades of this website is estimated to be at least 750 hours and valued at least $25K/year.
In the past year a large additional amount of “volunteer” time was committed toward the creation and maintainence of the School Building Committee website. This included the timely posting of web videos for 24/7 viewing and any other information that was requested by School Building Committee.
On www.Longmeadow.org you will find links to many other websites including LCTV, Bay Path College, Longmeadow Historical Society and LEEF. For other groups such as LongMeddowe Days, Gardeners on the Green as well as the various committee and boards, there are custom webpages that have been created for their use in communicating with town residents.
I estimate that over the past 13 years I have contributed close to 7500 hours of volunteer effort (at an estimated value of at least $200-250K) in the design and maintenance of the town website. This $$ value does not include the cost of computer hardware and software and other costs incurred by me with the operation of the town website. - www.LongmeadowBiz.com
This website is privately owned (by me) and provides a wealth of information and free web based resources to town residents including the Longmeadow Community Bulletin Board (including Town Notices), Town Calendar, free classified ads, etc. It existence is supported by local business advertising and there is absolutely no financial support by the town of Longmeadow. The income from the LongmeadowBiz.com website helps pay for the expenses incurred with the Longmeadow.org website.
As with the Longmeadow.org website, there are no personal opinions or other such information posted on the LongmeadowBiz.com website. Again, there are many links to other websites that can be found on this website including the LongmeadowBuzz blog. - LongmeadowBuzz Blog
Below is the message posted on every page of this blog (it is not a website).
LongmeadowBuzz is an open forum for discussion of local topics of interest to the residents of Longmeadow, Massachusetts. There will be no discussion of topics related to state or national politics because there are many other forums for such discourse. In this forum there are already a number of invited contributors who are town residents or town officials or both. If someone is interested in contributing an article to the forum, simply send a request to LongmeadowBuzz@comcast.net with your name and address and you will receive an invitation to join. Anyone can post a comment to a posting but we would like to disencourage anonymous entries. All comments on this forum are moderated to eliminate objectionable content.
The LongmeadowBuzz blog is not supported financially or in any other manner by the town of Longmeadow and all opinions are strictly those of the listed author and do not represent official town policy.
No comments:
Post a Comment