Starting at 5pm tonight, the Citizens Campaign -- a non-profit group dedicated to teaching and nurturing community activists and citizen journalists -- is hosting a "South Jersey Call to Service Summit" at Stockton College. Among the speakers will be yours truly. Hope you can make it.

Here are more details from the Citizens Campaign website:

The South Jersey Call to Service Summit has a new date, Tuesday March 16, 2010 from 5-8pm. SIGN UP ONLINE.

Want to actively participate in your community? You are invited to join government and political experts from around the state to discuss how citizens can effect positive change- from cutting your property taxes to rooting out government corruption.

This free South Jersey Call to Service Summit will provide you with insider knowledge and skills to effectively tackle the problems facing your town and county. The Summit will offer free training, including expert analysis and insight from political insiders, and open discussion on each of these topics.

Speakers include:

Keynote Speaker: Gil Medina, Cushman Wakefield, former Secretary of Commerce, former Camden City Councilman

Christopher Daggett, former DEP Commissioner and gubernatorial candidate
Debra P. DiLorenzo, President & CEO of the Chamber of Commerce of Southern New Jersey NJ State Senator Joseph Kyrillos
Paul Josephson, former Chief Counsel to the Governor and Legal Counsel to State Democratic Committee
Joan Wright, former Gov. Kean Cabinet Member & former Assemblywoman
Ted Mann, Founder, InJersey.com and Digital Director, Gannett News
Dr. Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr., President, Stockton College

Summit Program:

• 5-5:30: Networking & Registration (A Wing Gallery)
• 5:30-5:40: Welcome to the Jersey Call to Service (Alton Auditorium)
• 5:50-6:50: Break out Panels (B & C Wings)
• 7:00-8:00: Call to Service Celebration (F Wing Atrium)

Break Out Panels:

• Tools for Citizens to Control Prpoerty Taxes and Cut Government Waste
• Citizen Leadership Service- New Opportunities to Serve on Government Policy Boards under the Citizen Service Act.
• Citizen Control of Political Parties- Exploring the New Party Democracy Act
• Citizen Journalism- A Cure for Closed Door Government

Sign up online now!
Car Pooling available! Contact us 732-548-9798x2

While the recent foul weather has certainly put a damper on things in the garden state, there is one positive thing to come out of the last couple days. Two actually! Over the last few days we've rolled out two new InJersey sites devoted to Woodbridge and Morristown

The former is headed by Home News Tribune reporter Sergio Bichao, while the latter is being spearheaded by Daily Record editor Jim Namiotka and his team.

We hope you register to join these new sites and if you'd like to become a regular contributor, or just have questions about the site, please email Ted Mann, our site administrator.

InJersey has had a few upgrades lately, the most notable of which is the new interactive activity stream. If you've ever used social sites like Facebook and Twitter, this should be very familiar!

At the top, you'll find a box where you can post status updates or information you'd like to share with groups you belong to. Very soon, you'll also be able to post to community blogs you belong to. And around the same time we'll also be incorporating these activity streams onto the town blogs (Freehold, Flemington, Cherry Hill, etc), so you can use all these neat features right there.

A couple useful things to know:
• If you use @username (putting in a user on the site -- e.g. @colleencurry), the person you've mentioned will be notified.
• URLs in your posts are automatically turned into hyperlinks.
• You can sort the new activity stream using the "Filter" dropdown (e.g. show only your friends, or only your groups)
• You can reply to other items in your activity stream by clicking the "reply" button next to each item.
• Click on "Favorite" to save an item to your favorites list for future viewing.

For those curious about how this came about, the activity stream is one of the key new features of BuddyPress 1.2, which is a WordPress plugin that InJersey is built on. We plan to make even more use of it in the coming months, and use it very prominently on the site, as this is, we believe, a much easier path for our users to submit their own content.

In honor of what's coming to be know as iTablet week -- or is it iSlate? -- we wanted to make our own little offering to the Apple Gods. The InJersey iPhone app is simplified little interface you can use to browse through the latest updates on InJersey, or your town. It isn't the first self-described "hyperlocal" app -- I counted four others, not to mention related apps like SeeClickFix and Fwix -- and I'm sure it won't be the last.

You can't yet publish using the app, though that's something we'd like to build into it in the not-so-distant future. For now, though, you can download the WordPress 2 app and add your InJersey site of choice, and you'll be able to publish on the go using that.

A visitor to InJersey, Jim Parker, just let me know about a video of my presentation at WordCamp NYC that's up on the web. In it, I recap what we're trying to do with hyperlocal jounalism on InJersey, as well as the software we're using here -- WordPress and BuddyPress. Many thanks to Jim for the head's up, as well as the kind soul who shot this. Enjoy!

Our Freehold site editor, Colleen Curry, has a great blog post today on the SeeClickFix blog about all the great ways that our users have taken advantage of the tool to report issues in their communities that need fixing. Check out the full post here:

Hi there, SeeClickFix folks. My name is Colleen Curry, and I run Freehold.InJersey.com, a hyperlocal news website in New Jersey and one of Gannett's first hyperlocal sites in the country. We've been using SeeClickFix on our site for a few months now, and it has helped engage our readers, generate stories, and impel action in our local community. Ben asked me to share a few of these highlights with you.

via SeeClickFix blog

Everyone who's tried the new "After the Deadline" proofreading tool seems to be unanimous: It's the best way imaginable to check your spelling, grammar, and word usage. Only problem is, if you're anything like me, you probably hit publish before you remember to hit the proofread button.

Well, the good folks who created AtD have come up with a solution: A setting to make sure you auto-proofread all your posts. To enable this just go to the bar at the top of InJersey and navigate to your profile page.

There you'll see this:

When enabled, this feature will run AtD against your post (or page) before a publish or update. If any errors are found, you’ll be prompted with a dialog:

If you want to publish, click OK. Otherwise click Cancel to interact with the errors and make your changes.

The next time you hit Publish your post will go through.

via WordPress Plugin Update « After the Deadline.

Today we launched a new service to give you better grammar, spelling, and style-checking on your InJersey posts. Here's a quick video about how it works:

It's an incredibly powerful tool, which uses artificial intelligence and natural language processing technology to find your writing errors and offer smart suggestions.

Click in the editor to check spelling, style, and grammar to perform a check on your post before publishing.

Below is a video of a panel I hosted a few weeks back at an event at CUNY, hosted by Jeff Jarvis, about hyperlocal websites. The title of the session was "Setting up Shop," and since so many of these sites are blog-based, I invited Jane Wells of WordPress/Autoamattic, David Jacobs of TypePad/Six Apart, Jason Morrow of Blogger/Google, and Jeremy Zilar of the NY Times to join me on stage.

Setting Up Shop: Tools, Technology & Tips from CUNY Grad School of Journalism on Vimeo.

We've been hitting the interview and conference circuit lately to talk about what we're trying to build here on InJersey.

In addition to speaking at several events (from WordCamp to the Citizens Jouranlist Conference to HyperCamp), I also gave an interview to WPMU.org — which covers WordPress MU, the software that powers this site — about how we're trying steer the hyperlocal conversation here.

Check out the full Q&A here.