Acadiana Talk: A Lafayette Portal

One of the promises of the web has been to make good information easily accessible–and in that it has generally been an amazing success. You can find amazingly obscure infromation amazingly easily these days. Someone has posted to the web all you ever wanted to know, and more, about the care and cultivation of clumping bamboo in subtropical regions.

The big exception to the wealth of info is in local information, the sort of information that you’d love to have access to in order to get by day to day. How do you get good maps around here? Where’s a good body shop? Where can you safely take your aunt out for a drink when she comes into town? (You are NOT taking her where you usually go.) Are there any really good used book stores? What about good restaurants – one that serves a real hot plate lunch like you remember your dad taking you to eat at? Aren’t there any real hardware stores left–with clerks who know what a screw-in breaker is instead of kids that just snicker when you ask?

Well, Dane has launched a local portal which would help you find all that and more as well as giving you a good place to join many a discussion about all things Lafayette. It’s a clean, sophisticated site with an very ambitious structure. He’s started to populate some of the stable information and to seed the discussions but a project like this needs participation. And Lafayette needs a project like this.

Go over, take a look, root around and see how broad the possibilities are. Consider adopting some section as your special interest and try and give it a little life. Or post to a discussion group. The trick with a community portal like this is that it has to build up a community to support it. (I’ve tried to take my own advice: see my response to the query asking about good restaurants: “Whats your favorite place to eat?” I like the Creole Lunch House.)

There’s a special offer up now. The crew at Acadiana Talk is offering to set up a web page on Acadiana Talk for folks who need one for their community-minded organization. Write Dane if you’re interested.