DundeeOmaha.org began as an “unofficial experiment” in neighborhood news and information curation in 2001 by Dundee’s Dundee Labs, a division of SourceBurst Corporation, a web hosting company, owned and operated by long-time Dundee resident Joe Craig.
After a lengthy conversation at the infamous back table at Blue Line Coffee, Joe bought the domain and launched a site with a simple goal of capturing the news and information specific to the neighborhood. In today’s terminology, a hyper-local site.
Nearly twenty-two years later, DundeeOmaha continues to be an experiment in news and information aggregation within the neighborhood.
History
2001-2010
Back in the day, RSS feeds were readily available after the launch of a new website, to syndicate the news, information and events of that particular entity, business, nonprofit, school, etc. In 2001, most of the businesses were syndicating their content and the first version of DundeeOmaha.org was launched as a curation of these syndicated story headlines. In short, a repository of the headlines generated only by the neighborhood.
With the arrival of Friendster and MySpace, a handful of Dundee Merchants began pushing their content to these platforms and DundeeOmaha incorporated these news and information feeds into DundeeOmaha. With the arrival of Twitter (X), Facebook, Foursquare, Instagram and other social media platforms, DundeeOmaha exploded with visitors looking for a central repository of all the information.
2010-2020
A decade of news and information curation looks like a roller coaster ride.
Present
Today, unfortunately, most web designers and development companies do not turn on or build in an RSS feed for their client websites.
The majority of our contact with others is “why are you sharing so and so news and such and such information, but you’re not sharing ours?” We appreciate the inquiry and refer them back to their web designer to turn on their RSS feed for which they then share with us, bringing their headlines to the front page of DundeeOmaha, or a specific section.
The @DundeeOmaha Twitter account, with over eight-thousand followers, continues to drive traffic looking for Dundee news and information. The Facebook Page has over 600 followers and Instagram over 500.