Social media startup City 2.0 is a new online town-center and news site for Santa Barbara. It is designed to encourage local conversation and participation, allowing local users to easily access an extensive variety of local headlines, as well as share, discuss and publish news, opinions, photos, sports and other local events. City2 provides a simple, fun and extremely democratic online platform built to enrich our local Santa Barbara experience!

Among City2’s features:

» Up-to-the-minute local headlines: Our aggregation system feeds news and opinion headlines from the best RSS feeds Santa Barbara has to offer, including Noozhawk, The Average Man, BlogaBarbara, Craig Smith’s Blog, EdHat, KEYT, Off-Leash Public Affairs, the Santa Barbara Independent, Santa Barbara Man About Goleta and more.

» Free blogs for locals ( enabled for posting via Web, e-mail and phone): Local citizen blogs (personal and community) are available to anyone who signs up for a free account. We have built-in support for mobile (SMS, e-mail, Web) text, video and image submissions so events can be covered live.

» Local Forums: Easy-to-use community discussion forums.

City 2’s mission is to help locals create and maintain a healthy local dialogue; to keep one another informed; and to provide a sustainable and simple citizen journalism mechanism to compliment and enhance our local news experience.

Why? Because local citizens should have the tools at their disposal to be informed, and to inform one another. City2 provides easy-to-use tools for locals to write and publish “that op-ed piece that the paper won’t print,” to share pictures from their trip to a snowy Camino Cielo, or to report eyewitness news as it happens. City2 does not believe that “citizen journalism” is a replacement for traditional media, but does feel that traditional media needs to be kept on its toes. Projects like ours help to de-centralize the local media experience — which is important. Additionally, as our culture becomes more comfortable online, we clearly need an independent Web venue to discuss and share ideas about the issues that affect us at home.

Why aggregate local headlines? News aggregators are basically just online news stands. City2’s headline page allows visitors to choose what they would like to read, and even choose from categories of headlines (i.e. Hard News, Opinion, Health, Lifestyle, etc).

“What aggregators do is make it a lot easier for readers to find new news sources,” says Tim Lee of techdirt.com. “That’s good for an up-and-coming site with a lot of great content, because aggregators enlarge the potential audience for the content. But it’s not good for a mediocre site with a large readership based largely on inertia. The easier it is for readers to find new sources of news, the faster mediocre news sites will bleed readers … More competition forces sites to create more and better content, have fewer and less intrusive ads, and offer content in formats that are convenient and appealing. The increased competition enabled by aggregators may be bad for some Web sites, but it’s unambiguously good for consumers.”

We at City2 believe technology is changing our lives for the better. We feel this kind of project can help build a stronger community experience, and expand the possibilities of local democracy. As City2 grows and evolves, we will be always looking forward, for ways to improve our ability to help facilitate local dialogue — and will naturally be looking to our fellow community members for guidance.

Besides offering a unique combination of interactive features that are not offered elsewhere, we pride ourselves on keeping things simple, clear and accessible.

» Simple design: We have developed a look and feel that we believe will create a neutral and comfortable visual environment. We intend to continue to research, develop, adapt and improve our interface, voice and identity to keep the application intuitive, emotionally compelling and simple.

» Understated advertising: We have simple, nonintrusive supporter ads in the right-hand column. That’s pretty much it. We are very serious about this, and believe a “lack of obnoxiousness” will be another compelling reason for people to visit and use City2.

» Adaptability: We’re keeping our system very lightweight and easy to change. We want to be able to respond to the community’s needs quickly and creatively. At the moment, we’re working on adding local Twitter chatter to our feeds.

» Network of bloggers: Our unique blogging platform allows anyone to share photos, opinions, stories and events with the rest of the community, without curation from a site administrator. The community can rate, flag and comment on the best and worst items.

Click here for more information on City2 or e-mail Schultheis at info@city2.org.

Warren Schultheis is the founder of City 2.0.