Bakotopia wins an “Edgie”
The Bakotopia team, The Bakersfield Californian and I were awarded a 2006 Digital Edge Award for Most Innovative Participation for our website, Bakotopia. The award, known as an “Edgie”, was awarded by the Newspaper Association of America’s New Media Federation.
Bakotopia is an online community for the ‘young adult’ crowd in Bakersfield. It’s a place for local bands to get together and announce events and their fans to converse. But it is more than bands, it is a place where the users can define a profile, sell and buy stuff, make new friends, listen to local music streams, and meet like-minded people in Bakersfield.
I spend my days at The Bakersfield Californian working on the software platform that powers Bakotopia and several other sites. The platform, known internally as “Bakomatic”, is written from scratch in PHP, runs on Linux, and uses MySQL as its database engine. We have many big plans for the platform in this coming year, including many additional sites and cutting-edge features. Stay tuned!
I’d like to personally thank the rest of my team and the leadership at The Bakersfield Californian for their great work, forward thinking, and enthusiastic support. Your willingness to embrace technological advances makes cutting-edge products like our platform possible. By looking at changing technology as a benefit instead of something for the newspaper industry to fear you insure the paper and all the company’s endeavors will continue to flourish.
Bakotopia, as well as our other sites, are really a team effort, of which I am only a small part of. Thank you to Publisher Ginger Moorhouse, CEO Richard Beene, The Bakersfield Californian executive staff, Mary Lou Fulton, Dan Pacheco, Mark Jackson, Mick Martinek, and the rest of the ‘Colorado Boys’, Matt Munoz, and the many others at The Bakersfield Californian who are making this project an astounding success.
I plan to write in more detail in the coming months about all the exciting work I am doing at the paper. Until then, check out our three existing ‘brands’ powered by the platform, make a profile, meet some friends, and have fun!
Bakotopia – http://www.bakotopia.com/
Más – http://www.masbakersfield.com/
The Northwest Voice – http://www.northwestvoice.com/
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Congrats dude! It’s always nice to get recognized for a job well done.
Comment by nickl — 2/27/2006 @ 11:14 am
Way to go Chris. What a proud Mom I am!!
Comment by Mom — 2/27/2006 @ 7:04 pm
We are the champions! Chris, please take a bow.
Comment by Dan — 2/28/2006 @ 10:24 am