The latest installment in the ongoing saga of our beltline funding is that we are grasping at federal money, as surely they have plenty to spare. The Atlanta Beltline is applying for the TIGER II grant and wants us to help demonstrate that the people of the city back the project with an online petition. They’re hoping that a swell of popular excitement and support will help convince federal officials in charge of handing out free money that the Beltline’s the place to invest. The petition, making the rounds on twitter and FB, has had more than 1400 signatures at the time of this writing, which was within a day of posting.

Over at CL, Thomas Wheatley points out that this is the same funding for which the Atlanta streetcar project is applying – see the Saporta Report on their proposal here. Interesting. Can I sign something supporting both?

Read about and sign the petition here. I may bitch about it, but I’m a fan of the Atlanta Beltline (see? So much a fan that I even call it the Atlanta Beltline like they want us to, instead of just the Beltline!), and think that its development will be a large part of our city growing into its city-ness. Paved paths and rail will make a difference in my daily commutes, entertainment and exercise, and hopefully would encourage more people to take advantage of alternative options. This grant would mean 11 miles of multi-use trails within 3 years – 2013 is a LONG ways away, but I think we ought to take progress wherever we can get it.

Have no fear, loyal listeners – contrary to what we all thought, metblogs isn’t shutting down (some sort of technical difficulties probably involving serious mathematical equations put things on hold for a while yesterday).  See here for  details and donation opportunities, if that’s your sort of thing, for the greater metblogs site.

This means Atlanta metblogs is back for the attack.  We’ll continue updating y’all on sports teams on which I cannot name a single player, bitching about traffic and transit, debating the merits and potential of Underground, hyping scoutmob, and lamenting the loss of Tortillas.  Anything else you’d like to hear about, or think everyone else should hear about? Let us know, we may very well even get around to posting it!

since i posted about scoutmoba few weeks ago*, i thought i would just take a moment to follow up on my experiences with the service.

i have used it twice, both times for 50% of deals. the first time i used it was the day after scoutmob had launched and i used it at no mad cantina and while the server was a bit confused when i showed him my phone, he returned with the manager who promptly gave me 50% off the check.

by the time i used scoutmob a week later for brunch at murphy’s the servers were pretty well prepared and the table next to me was actually using a scoutmob coupon too (one note from murphy’s – the scoutmob iphone app requires you to be near the location to get the coupon and i couldn’t get a gps connection inside so it wouldn’t let me pull up the coupon. suggest pulling up the coupon before heading into a venue.)

both of those establishments were picked, btw, because i had a scoutmob coupon.

there are a ton of other scoutmob coupons sitting on my phone that i am dying to use too as soon as the opportunity presents itself.

so call me a fan. you should get on board atlanta, and if you have an iphone get the app. it’s a pretty cool way to manage the coupons.

well, why not?

everybody needs a little cute in their lives.

today’s cuteness comes courtesy of atlanta’s excellent center for puppetry arts. the center is currently running a contest called the amazon rainforest coloring contest for kids k-5th grade.

what makes this great is the center is uploading them all to their flickr page.

so head over there and spend about three minutes looking at some fine work from atlanta’s youngster.

bound to put a smile on your face and make you forget about whatever you were thinking about for a second.

two things i love:

1. twitter
2. the atlanta hawks

and one thing that brings me immense glee is the powerful combination of the two. two hawks players tweet with pretty serious regularity, centers al horford (@al_horford) and zaza pachulia (@zaza27). you may remember that zaza even responded to me by twitter this summer when i wrote him a letter on this blog urging him to resign with atlanta (i still take credit for his ultimate resigning too!!)

al horford has been a very engaged twitterer, giving away tickets and hosting q&a sessions with fans. he has even responded to me twice by direct message. fwiw, this is why al is fast becoming a favorite among the hawks faithful. great play, great effort, great personality and being engaged with fans and the community.

in addition, hawks vp of communications, arthur triche (@hawksprman), is active on twitter and will often respond to slam magazine executive editor lang whitaker (@langwhitaker – himself a diehard hawks fan) in 140 character bursts.

add to that hawks tv play-by-play man bob rathburn (@hawksvoice) and several hawks bloggers (@peachtreehoops, @hawkstr8talk) and the official hawks twitter account (@atlanta_hawks) and the hawks twitter community has become an active part of being a fan for me.

so get on board, and don’t forget to follow the hawks banished mascot @spiritthehawk (not official but hillarious none the less.)

follow these people and NOW YOU KNOW!!!!

we love to try to bring you the scoop on the social media stuff when we can here at the atlanta metblog. one thing i wanted to pass along to you is a new social media “deal” service is going to be launching in atlanta tomorrow called scoutmob.

scoutmob is being brought to you by the same folks behind skyblox, atlanta’s largest provider of free wi-fi. the service will be an exercise in group buying. every day, scoutmob will send out subscribers one deal to a local business either through email or you guessed it, iphone app. no charge, no advertising, just one deal, hand-picked every day.

a quick scoop the folks at scoutmob wanted me to pass along to you, the first deal goes out tomorrow and will be to murphy’s in virginia-highland, which is a fine establishment and worth getting a coupon to for sure.

to sign up head on over to scoutmob.com or download the iphone app which is in the app store now and be ready for some killer free deals.

also, check out their blog for info on getting an invite to a launch event.

social media free stuff, FTW!!!!!

Digg.com founder Kevin Rose posted an interesting video about having free pizza and beer at a San Francisco restaurant. It wasn’t free because he was Kevin Rose. It was free because his friend was the mayor of the restaurant on foursquare.com.

What is foursquare you ask? It’s a location based social networking site where users tell others their locations. If you frequent an establishment you eventually become mayor.

More Atlanta businesses need to be doing this. This is essentially free advertising for businesses. If the user broadcasts their location to Twitter and Facebook then all who follow and are friends on Facebook will see this. The mayor should be duly rewarded. Imagine if your bar, shop or store became a competition for the mayorship on foursquare. This equates to countless posts with your name on it, bringing awareness and dollars.

Atlanta needs to get with it. We were made fun of at Atlanta WordCamp 2010 because of the lack of hash tags. Giving the virtual mayor of your business a little reward for the free publicity is the least you can do.

January 8-9, 2010 marked the first, and ostensibly, annual Atlanta WordCamp. WordCamps happen all over the country and bring together web developers, bloggers, business people, newbies and software writers to network with each other and learn about WordPress. In fact, Atlanta Metblogs is a WordPress blog. WordPress is a free, powerful, open source platform for managing content on the web.

Hosted at the extraordinary SCAD Atlanta campus, Atlanta WordCamp was organized by Brandon Sheats and Tessa Horehled.

The presentations ranged from highly technical discussions such as Topher Kohan on SEO & WordPress, Rusty Tanton on Google Analytics & WordPress Integration to a beginner’s presentation of WordPress by Adria Richards.

The highlight for me was the Genius Bar. I spent about 30 minutes with John Saddington. This session alone was worth the $45 I paid for WordCamp. John consulted me on my new project, WorkingInMusic.com, sharing a lot of invaluable information. Saddington’s presentation how to be a Freelancer with WordPress was also one of the most entertaining and inspiring presentations of the weekend. Saddington assured everyone that we could all be freelance WordPress consultants.

There were lots of other presentations I could not attend however I can, and so can you, watch them on SCAD’s USTREAM Channel.

Overall the weekend and all the presentations went smoothly. I made lots of connections and learned a lot. I highly recommend attending next year’s Atlanta WordCamp which will be February 11-12, 2011.

we always like to give a bit of a shout out to atlanta-based business that we particularly like, and we are not doubt fans of the atlanta-based startup regator, a blog aggregation and filtering service. we particularly like the fact that regator hand picks the blogs fed into it’s service, which while potentially reflecting bias on the part of the fliterers (although if it does it’s indsicernable to us), has the great affect of ensuring that junk stays out of the feed.

either way, reagtor launched it’s iphone app today (download here) and we are more than impressed. it’s easy to navigate with a crisp ui. additionally they enabled landscaping, which is a huge bonus for any app that wants to build web browsing into the app (ahem tweetdeck) and seems on first use (we played around with it extensively on the bus this morning) to be almost bug free (again, amazing for a first cut iphone app.)

kudos to regator on a job well done!!!

in other atl web start-up news we are intrigued by spitter.com which looks to be a regator-type aggregator for sports combined with social-networking forum thingys. since it’s atlanta-based and sports oriented we’ll probably check it out and if we aren’t too lazy we might give you a report.

also, we don’t know why we are writing in the first person plural. we pledge to stop this immediately upon conclusion of this post.

we promise.

Did you see this? ABC News took notice of the community-driven, social-media-enabled crime prevention going on here in the ATL. This segment looks specifically at Atlantans Together Against Crime, webcam video surveillance in the home, and community vigilance in EAV combining civilian patrols with the likes of Twitter and Facebook to get the word out. Click through the image to watch the video at ABC.com:

ATL on ABC News