iBrattleboro Turns 18

It’s 02-20-2021 and iBrattleboro is 18 today.  Watch out now, we’re all grown up and can vote! Still a few more years until we can rent a car, but hey…

More seriously, the site stated 18 years ago as a place for people in the Brattleboro area to share news, events, information and opinions. iBrattleboro can be whatever you, the community contributor, wants it to be.  If it is exciting and useful, you made it so.

We’re averaging about 26,000 unique visitors a month, depending on news and weather. Most of those people visit more than once a month, too. Nearly 3,800 people have registered to add something since we began.

When we tweet out your headlines and events, it goes to a list of almost 1,600.

iBrattleboro has been delivering you a regional COVID dashboard fro almost a year now.  We’ve had entirely free ads for Brattleboro area businesses since COVID began. We continue to have free classifieds, too.

I’d like to re-invite the community to share news about your organizations, neighborhoods, meetings, businesses, and so on. Write a book or movie review. Share that “letter to the editor” without the editor making any changes to it. This is a site for people who like words.

Newer readers might think we have a staff. Ha! This is all citizen-powered, and is a measure of how much local citizen power is being activated. What can you contribute to make us all better, more informed members of the community? Everybody can do something.

Please take advantage of the free space we give you to publish. Educate your neighbors.

I do it. I spend 3-27 hours on Tuesday evenings writing up Selectboard meetings for all of us. No one pays me. I do it because others benefit from this information and the town, one would hope, is better off for it. But it is volunteer work.

This site is about self-publishing. Just get an account and get to work. Publish that press release yourself, when you want it to go out.

BTW, there is a semi-hidden, very-unused part of the site that lies waiting for those who are fed up with corporate social media. You and your friends and coworkers could choose to dump Mr. Zuckerberg and create your own pages and posts here, and never have to worry about us tracking you or selling your data. It’s an option. Your choice.

Every registered user has their own page, can invite friends to groups, and send messages. Login, then Read/Comment> My Page.   Your submissions to the overall site are also posted there.  Then you can make new signs for your windows that say “Find Me On iBrattleboro.”

Want to give iBrattleboro a present this year? Contribute a comment once in a while. That’s all. One little comment. Just let us all know you are alive and thinking. Say hi, ask a question, disagree with something. 

Happy 18th, everyone.