October has been a very busy month.

We've been gathering and organizing election content for Tuesday's big races and The Record's Election Page, experimenting with live-blogging (thanks to the ideaLab netbook) and live-streaming (thanks to the iPhone) interviews and debates with political candidates, and developing a seminar for the official unveiling of our Community Media Lab, as well as future projects we plan to integrate with it.

The Record will be hosting an event in our re-designed first-floor media lab on Nov. 10 from 5:30-6:30 p.m. to celebrate the lab's opening and discuss what we hope to do with the space and the initiative that spawned its creation.

We are inviting all of our bloggers as well as members of the public to this meeting for a chance to meet as many of them as we can in person and open the lines of discussion for how they think we might be able to improve our content in the future.

Read more »

First off, I regret that I haven't updated this blog in about two weeks. Things have been rather hectic around the office as we prepared to launch The Record's Stimulus Tracker, a week-long JRC project which showcases the impact the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act has had on the nation.

I've also been working to set up and manage a few photo contests that we're hoping will attract a decent level of reader participation throughout the rest of 2010.

Our Halloween contest, “Fright Night”, is currently accepting entries for anyone in the Capital Region who wants a chance at some restaurant gift certificates and a larger grand prize we hope to soon announce. Click here to check it out.

---

After having success with my first ideaLab project of getting reporters to go mobile when filing their articles, which I'm continuing to encourage around the office, I've chosen to make my second ideaLab project focus on developing uses for our on-site Community Media Lab.

Our media lab at The Record is a mid-sized room located off of the main entrance to our building at 501 Broadway in Troy. At the moment it is set up with several long tables to host meetings and presentations, but we hope to soon bring some technology such as a netbook computer and television display into the environment as well.

Read more »