utility

I've been tooling around on Vita.mn, the new youth-focused entertainment website from the Star Tribune in Minneapolis. It's good to see the Star Tribune back in the groove, breaking new ground.

There's a lot to like in this effort -- wiki-like collaborative "guides" authored by the community, a solid foundation of basic listings, calendaring, free tagging and social networking. And it's refreshingly fast. My only immediate complaint is that it doesn't do enough to celebrate its "people" functionality -- some of the cool stuff is quite buried.

Here's something offered by too few local websites: a solid primer on "the basics" of local life from the Pocono Record in Pennsylvania.