Hyattsville 2.0

Greetings and welcome to the inaugural blog of Hyattsville 2.0.

The idea behind this blog is to cover all the social media and Internet outlets that pertain to the City of Hyattsville each week.  I’ll scour through the HOPE list serve, Hyattsville Facebook page, Facebook pages of Hyattsville  businesses (not people, although those of you with an iPhone, I’m watching your every step), maybe some YouTube videos, the Hyattsville list serve, Twitter, and anything else I come across.  The idea is to send out a weekly blog of the “goings on” as kind of a recap.  If, during the course of this blog, you notice something I missed that is of importance, do not hesitate to contact me directly (jgroves4ward2@gmail.com) or just pop it into the discussion.

Who am I? Well, first and foremost, I am not a great speller, writer or grammar expert and I use exclamation point too much!!!  Let make it very clear that if I put my apostrophes in the wrong place or forget to use it all together, get over it!   Second, I am the moderator of the HOPE List Serve which, as of today, is 691 email addresses strong. Not so shabby since we started out just a few years ago with under 100 people. I’ve lived in Hyattsville for coming up on 20 years and volunteer on the Hyattsville Environmental Committee as well as being the co-creator and current moderator of the HyattsvilleWiki.

I’m not here to push any agenda, just to report out with info you may not have seen and I’ll try to add in my own brand of humor as well.

Here’s a quick taste of what it will look like, although I reserve the right to totally change it around!

HOPE List Serve – A couple of the topics that caught my eye on the HOPE list serve this week were:

1.  Support Sgt. Suzie Johnson – One of Hyattsville’s finest has made it to the finals of the America’s Most Wanted 2001 All-Star competition. Head on over and vote for her – you can vote for her once a day!
2. A little discussion ensued about marketing on the list serve – can you, how often, etc.  Being a moderator is fairly easy, except for every now and again where I have to actually do something, like make a policy or a decision. My approach is that everyone on the list serve is an adult, it takes less than a second to delete an email and if someone abuses the list serve, I put them on moderation. Other’s piped in about other ways to advertise, like through the L&T or setting up their own webpage or list serve.
3. Dead Beaver: The story was that the beaver dam in Magruder park was ripped down and lying in the wreckage was a skinned beaver.  Nasty photo – let me know if you want to see a copy!  At first, the question was if the city DPW did this, but then it came back that no, they did not.  The DPW opened up the damn and that was when they discovered the carcass of the beaver. Who killed it? Who skinned it? If you see this guy walking around town, we may want to question him.

Hyattsville Facebook page posted an announcement about the Historic House Tour that takes May 15.  More info on that here.  I’m thinking they would really boost their participation if the House Tour merged with the Hyattsville Wine Crawl. Also, if you are looking for some cool old photos of Hyattsville, check out “April 1886” that the City puts together.  Some interesting old time photos of our City.

On the Twitter feed for #Hyattsville there is not usually a lot of traffic other than for the HyattsvillePatch which has done a great job with social media.  However, Elevation Burger and Bus Boys & Poets are both in the Twitter realm. If you are a tweeter, search on #hyattsville during a council meeting. Sarah Nemeth tweets out in real time what is going on.

I’ll leave you with a quick video of my favorite surf band “Reverb Galaxy” performing at Magruder Park last week…enjoy!