Derek Young and Kevin Freitas served as the featured speakers at today's City Club luncheon at the Landmark. So Dave Zeeck and I crashed the party to hear their thoughts about social media and local online community.

Both gave informative presentations despite the fact that there was no projector or screen, so no show and tell. So it was challenging for them to explain to those in the audience who didn't know what a blog is or how FeedTacoma works (about half of the audience raised their hand when Derek asked how many had visited Exit 133).

Each has an impressive story to tell, really. And both were quick to credit Tacoma and the community of users on their respective sites for helping them grow into what they've become over the past couple years. I don't think you could pick up either site and put it down in another town and have the same results (something they each alluded to).

It's not the software that makes these sites special, it's the people - both those who created and power them and those who consume and contribute.

The service provider for our weather forecasts is experiencing some serious technical issues, which has interrupted our ability to provide weather information on thenewstribune.com. I'm told by my contact at Weather Underground that they are working on the problem and hope for a fix very soon.

If you are technically inclined and curious, here's what happened:

In the middle of the afternoon today (Tuesday) a technician at Network
Solutions corrupted the DNS NS records for wunderground.com. As a
result, all name lookups to wunderground.com point to a server that knows nothing about wunderground.com, thus resulting in the Network Solutions marketing page. They understand that they caused the problem and have engineers trying to work around the issue.

UPDATE (1:45 p.m.): The service has been restored.