Chicago NOW

ChicagoNow is a new place for Chicagoans to connect and share their interests with each other. We think of it as an online town square for the Chicago of right now--the city that gave the world a president and may host the world for an Olympics. ChicagoNow's public beta site launched in May, but the idea for it took shape more than a year earlier when we decided to recognize the Chicago's best blogs. That effort grew into chicagosbestblogs.com. Not surprisingly, we found plenty of Chicaogans who had plenty to say about our town. We felt like we could and should do something to connect Chicago's diverse online voices and create a platform for them so larger audiences could see what we saw. We turned to Moveable Type expert Byrne Reese to develop ChicagoNow using the latest social-media tools. Jason Santa Maria designed it. Now our dedicated crew of journalists, designers and developers is bringing the site to life, though it is far from a finished product. While the site is owned by the Chicago Tribune Media Group, we hope that ChicagoNow will belong to its contributors and users. We want the site to evolve as they think best. To foster that evolution, we will impose as few rules as possible-certainly fewer and different ones than we have on chicagotribune.com. Read what we expect from our community members. and our bloggers. You can keep track of our progress on our staff blog. If you have a question about the site or a suggestion on how to improve it, please e-mail us.