I’ve sort of hit critical mass with a variety of announcements and information I want to put out there and it doesn’t really fit one theme, so I’m just going to ball it all up together and throw it at you like a big, dripping snowball. Since some of it won’t apply to or interest everyone, I’m including a variety of photographs from my backlog. As usual, they haven’t really found a place in a blog, but I wanted to put them out there.
In the first bit of news, I’m ready to launch a new service I’ve talked about for months: individual property listings. If you are a realtor or have a property to sell or lease, you may be interested. A number of visitors to the site have noticed the “Downtown Properties” tab at the top of this page. So many people contact me expressing an interest in moving to, investing in or leasing downtown property, that it seems an obvious service to offer here.
Since I placed the tab at the top of the page in August and dropped in four random properties as examples of what could happen there, I’ve had nearly 1400 people click to that page. That’s about eight people a day looking into downtown properties, with no updates or promotion from me, so I know the interest is there. Contact me at knoxvilleurbanguy@gmail.com if you are interested. The cost is $25 per month per property. There’s a Paypal link on the page, so I could have a property listed immediately.
Of course, I’m happy to hear from businesses who would like to advertise on the front page of this blog. I’ve been fortunate to have several great sponsors since last summer and I appreciate them very much. They make a lot of this possible, as they bought my computer, camera, photography classes and tech support. The cost for a front page ad is currently $200 a month, so let me know if your business might be interested in an ad or sponsorship spot.
In other great blog news, November marked the first time I had over 30,000 page views in a month. As a reference point, I had about 1700 in June of 2010, the month I began this project. The November record will be broken by this month’s totals, so more of you keep joining our little urban nation.
Also, on January 16, with my post about Bradley’s Chocolate Factory, I reached the one-thousandth post for this blog. I’m as proud of that as anything. I’m not sure I’ve ever done a thousand of anything else in my life. Which brings up another point: I appreciate you guys. Some of you read the first post, some of you just started reading this month and most of you fall somewhere in between. Without you I would have given it up a long time ago. I had a vision of building a community of sorts around our common passion for downtown and I think we’re accomplishing that.
As a result of these successes, I’ve been invited to participate on a panel discussion about the changing landscape of online journalism next week at the monthly meeting of the Knoxville Writer’s Guild. Jack McElroy of the News Sentinel, Laura Long of Celebrate Knoxville and my friend Debra Dylan of Knoxzine will join me on the panel. Follow the link for a more detailed description of the event.
I suggested to the publicist that my main qualification was that I’ve failed successively at songwriting, poetry writing, novel writing and short story writing, so this was my last shot. It should be interesting. The meeting will be held at the Laurel Theater in lovely Fort Sanders at the corner of Laurel and Sixteenth at 7:00 PM, Thursday February 6, one week from today. A $2 donation is requested and I’d love to see a big group of you there. You can even walk over with me, if you’d like. I would appreciate it if one of you would use my camera (or yours) to grab a couple of shots of the event. Anybody?
Finally, I’d like to point out that tonight is the first night of Waynestock. It’s a showcase for local music talent and the best way that I know of to get a great survey of the local music scene. This is the fourth annual festival which started three years ago in honor of Drew Bledsoe, the son of local music critic Wayne Bledsoe. Wayne has helped so many local musicians through the years, they wanted to give something back. Each year has raised money for a good cause and all the musicians donate their time. It’s $5 a night which is dirt cheap. If you love music, this one is a no-brainer.
Join me at Relix. I’ll be photographing and blogging live, so I should be easy to spot. Come up and say, “hello.” And join me next week at the Laurel Theater. I’d love to see you at both.