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We’ve got a few open spots for tomorrow’s monthly meeting of the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab.

Joel Postman, author of the Socialized blog on social media will speak and answer questions.

Postman, from Boulder Creek, consults and provides social media strategy, implementation and measurement for progressive companies and non-profit organizations (see Bio).

The Media Lab meetings have been good opportunities for bloggers and Sentinel journalists to talk about their work and make connections. At our March gathering, Nina Simon talked about starting the Museum 2.0 blog, and the ways it changed her life. Going around the room, Media Lab bloggers talked about the way every post seemed to make another connection or another door. We hope our face-to-face meeting offer those opportunities.

We’re meeting at noon, Wednesday at Cruzio – no charge, but bring your own lunch. Send us a note (cml.santacruz@gmail.com) or check in on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/events/414876248611788/ if you plan to attend.

Thanks! Tom

If you would like to talk to Sentinel health reporter Jondi Gumz about health health insurance, email jgumz@santacruzsentinel.com or call 831-706-3253.

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Several letter writers have expressed discontent with the idea of “Keep Santa Cruz Weird” recently. We surveyed our Facebook friends to generate a list of other options. Vote for your favorite, or write in your own answer.

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We have soft-launched a new website within the Santa Cruz Sentinel, reaching out the Santa Cruz visitors in a completely new way with “Destination Santa Cruz.”

Built using Rebelmouse to manage stories, photos and social posts from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Media Lab members and others around Santa Cruz County, we’re linking to the best and latest stories, events and information for visitors to Santa Cruz.

We’re also providing advertisers with a wide variety of possibilities for reaching out to visitors, managing their ad postings through Rebelmouse, and offering to connect local tourism related businesses to social followers of Destination Santa Cruz on Twitter and Facebook.

We believe that anyone considering visiting Santa Cruz will find all they need, including connections to the Sentinel calendar, an opportunity to book reservations and the most recent news about all that Santa Cruz has to offer.
Posts will include Arts & Entertainment coverage from longtime Sentinel writer Wallace Baine on the Muse Santa Cruz blog, the Sentinel’s outstanding food and dining coverage, the Sentinel’s best calendar listings, and links out to great posts from around the county.

Thanks to Christina Gullickson and Shannon Burns for their work in conceiving and designing the site.

The Sentinel reached more than 500,000 unique visitors in the month of February and our sites and apps generated more than 6 million page views.

To advertise on Destination Santa Cruz, call 831-706-3274.

The Santa Cruz Community Media Lab gathered Monday for its February meeting and talked about arts, entertainment and the cultural life in Santa Cruz.

Longtime Sentinel arts and entertainment writer Wallace Baine talked with Media Lab members at Cruzio. (Thanks Chris Neklason!). Wallace has teamed up with Kirby Scudder to build a new blog for the Sentinel – The Muse Santa Cruz with the intention of becoming the hub of arts and cultural information for the community.

Wallace has pushed ahead with the blog, with some tireless work from Kirby to build and populate the site. They’re planning a launch party Thursday, Feb. 28th 6-9 p.m. at the Tannery, and all are invited.

Wallace talked about a wide variety of possibilities for the Muse. Among them:

• A more realtime orientation to updates about the arts community
• Guest blog posts
• Multimedia
• Outreach to the community for photos, writing and video
• Linking out to creative events and reviews around Santa Cruz County
• Stories and photos that appear in the Sentinel printed Guide, which comes out every Thursday

If you’re interested in connecting with the Sentinel’s arts and entertainment coverage, and the Muse blog, reach out to Wallace.

This month marks a year since the Sentinel launched its Community Media Lab project. More than 200 bloggers have become involved in one way or another. We link out to the best posts every day, promote those links on the Sentinel home page, on the Media Lab page, through Facebook and twitter and other social media sites. Sentinel copy editor My Nguyen does most of the daily updates and also attended Monday. The lab’s page received more than 10,000 page views in 2012.

The people and organizations that have joined the project have been unfailingly helpful (among other cool developments, we started a Facebook group where questions are posed and help is given among bloggers on social, technical and other questions). Participants have provided news tips, breaking news photos, front page story suggestions, promoted worthy causes, and more importantly, shared their voices about what it’s like to live, struggle, create and celebrate in Santa Cruz.

Our face-to-face meetings with with members have been enjoyable without exception. Sentinel reporters, editors and photographers who have attended always come away feeling energized and full of the possibilities for their work and network. The project has informed us about the possibilities for collaboration in every aspect of Sentinel coverage.

We hope (and believe) that Media Lab bloggers come away from the meetings with new ideas and a better understanding of what the Sentinel is about.

Thanks for attending Monday to Sentinel Digital Producer Christina Gullickson and bloggers from:

• Positively Santa Cruz
• The Aums
• Motherhood, A Descent Into Madness
• Seasonal Eating
• Tom Jacobs Photography
• Laugh.research.write.run
• Riding Pretty
• Civinomics

- Tom Moore

Volcom has offered $20,000 for the first kickflip on a surfboard “above and off the lip.” Santa Cruz’s Zoltan Torkos has submitted several videos in the competition (one of his best is pictured below). Here are the rules, according to Volcom:

Volcom is giving away $20,000 to the first person that can land a “proper” kickflip while surfing! By proper we mean an “above and off the lip” kickflip where first you bottom turn, launch an air, use your front foot to flip the board, and then land on it and ride out cleanly. No chop hops, backwash, fingerflips, grabs or laybacks. Just a proper kickflip. We’re going to be strict on these following guidelines. The rules are all listed here, so get out there and put this trick in the history books. Good luck!

Rules:
1. Your entry must be on video from the start of the trick through the ride out. No photos allowed.
2. This contest is open to everyone. The contest begins today and will run until there’s a winner.
3. The kickflip must be a proper air that begins from a bottom turn, is launched “above and off the lip” and travels above the wave. No backwash, No chop hops, or anything in the flats, from the wave face, or below the lip of the wave.
4. All waves must be self caught – You must paddle into the wave. This means NO tow-ats, step-offs, jetskis, boats, dinghys, winches, canoes, oars, helicopters, dolphins or assistance of any kind.
5. No grabs of any kind. Not before, not after, not during.
6. You must completely “ride out” of the kickflip. That means if you land on the back of the wave and fail to continue surfing the wave – it’s not a make!
7. No heelflips. Or else we’d have called it the Heelflip-Off.
8. No shoes. Who surfs in shoes anyway? Regular “made for surfing” booties are acceptable.
9. You must be riding a real surfboard with at least one fin. No boogie boards, softboards, wakeboards, wakeskates, skimboards, kiteboards, trays etc.

Here’s the video explanation of the contest rules. (Volcom already paid Torklos $10,000 in its first edition of the challenge).

Here’s Zoltan Torkos of Santa Cruz in one of his submitted kickflips:

Zoltan deserves a vote. What do you think?

The Sentinel website, staff blogs and mobile apps received more than 4.8 million page views for the month of January. Below we’ve included a list of most-viewed stories. The list is topped, unfortunately, by an account of a man who adopted an unusual fighting technique. The story was picked up on the front page of fark.com and received more than 20,000 page views.

Those kind of stories, even when they get some viral attention, don’t drive the most traffic on the site. The Sentinel home page received more than 870,000 views. Photo galleries, led by shots from the Mavericks Invitation, this year and years past, generated more than 110,000 views. The Sentinel calendar (look for February updates to the most-used online calendar in the county) accounted from more than 85,000 views.

Of the total of close to 5 million views, about 20 percent (just shy of 1 million) came from mobile apps for iPhone, Android and iPad that didn’t exist in January 2011, and more than 370,000 came from m.santacruzsentinel.com – viewed on mobile web browsers.

Upcoming projects include the launch of updated tourism pages, a new commenting system (hint: Disqus), calendar updates (hint: Eventful), site redesign, continued work with the Santa Cruz Community Media Lab, more extensive use of photos.santacruzsentinel.com for local photo presentations, updates to Sentinel staff blogging platforms, an updated content management system, development of local apps from our newsroom, and we’ve been experimenting with interesting possibilities from rebelmouse.com.

With all kinds of hard work from Kirby Scudder and Wallace Baine, we’ve also launched The Muse blog – for all things related to the Creative Life in Santa Cruz County. Sign up for e-mail updates for all new posts (bottom right of the blog) to be connected with the best art & entertainment coverage.

Thanks to all who visited the Sentinel online, on your phones, tablets, and to our print and e-edition subscribers. We’re taking your news tips and suggestions 24/7.

Most viewed stories for January:

1. Man drops drawers during fight challenge on West Cliff Drive, police said
2. Galactic surprise: New find overturns theories how our galaxy evolved
3. Teen with dad, dog drives off Santa Cruz wharf
4. Driver strikes cyclist on Branciforte Drive, then crashes into concrete divider
5. Killer whales on the hunt in the Monterey Bay
6. Newsmaker 2012: Fatal party bus incident under review by Santa Clara County prosecutors
7. Dave’s Gourmet Albacore ends 13-year run in Santa Cruz
8. Scotts Valley-area man missing since Friday
9. Images released of fake doctor in Santa Cruz hospital heist
10. Felton woman injured in 2009 Mount Hermon Road crash dies
    

It’s a big sports Sunday in the Bay Area, and approaching kickoff we ask this question of Sentinel readers:

You may have noticed things look a little different at www.santacruzsentinel.com. That’s because we’ve decided to start the new year right, by going through and doing some housekeeping on our home page (Thanks, Christina Gullickson!). Here are some highlights of how our site is different in 2013:

1. Bigger headers, with RSS feeds and links to cleaned-up section pages.
2. New section feeds including Food and Wine, and Home and Garden. Our features department regularly produces helpful and informative pieces that now will be more prominently displayed. Because these are weekly sections, they will be boosted from the bottom of the page to higher up when they publish.
3. We removed some of the clutter. Many of the items that were creating the NASCAR effect on our home page have either been cleaned up or removed (where possible) for a better viewing and reading experience.

Coming soon: Updates to our social media feeds on every page. We’re going to update and improve our events calendar. Redesign of the entire site, courtesy of Digital First Media, is also in the works.

Suggestions? There are some things we just can’t change due to advertising obligations or our content management system setup (also scheduled to be updated this year), but if you have an idea, it’s possible we can make it happen. Let us know!

PS – We’re also working on a repository of the vast “Weird” news from Santa Cruz – follow @weirdsantacruz on twitter, like us on Facebook and visit the Weird page.

An informal Sentinel reader poll: