If you’ve never had something important to you become grist for the rumor mill, I can only hope that you do experience at some point in your life. It changes your perspective in a fundamental way, because you not only get to hear rumors, you also get a rare window into the often hidden biases [...]
This week, the Big Idea is mind-blowingly simple: I’ve heard the words “there’s nothing to do downtown” fall out of way too many people’s mouths of recent, and I’m getting tired of it. So here’s the score: Take a look at what five minutes of looking uncovered happening tomorrow right in the heart of downtown. [...]
Yesterday, I was hanging out in Asheville with an old friend, and talking about movies. It’s what we mostly talk about when we get together, and it was even more relevant because he was showing me the basics of three-point lighting for a non-Spark project I’ve been working on. As we talked about all kinds [...]
Today’s Big Idea may be the easiest yet. I want to hear ideas from you, our loyal readers, about what you would like to write about for the site. We’re nearly two years into this project, and we need more voices, more participants, more ideas and more content if we’re going to keep the momentum [...]
Today’s Big Idea is actually more of a Big Request: As the Spark continues to produce video and audio content, we’re going to need music. Given our extremely local focus, we’d definitely like to start featuring local music rather than relying on the Creative Commons-licensed tunes we’ve been using. So, your task today is to [...]
A good summer experience requires a little planning. I’m not talking about an itinerary that schedules every single event down to the minute like some Type-A parent with an empty notepad and an adderall habit, I’m just talking about something a bit more basic. I’m thinking more along the lines of a simple checklist of [...]
We’ve all dealt with it at some point. There you’ll be, either out of town or talking to someone who isn’t from the area, and the subject of where you live will come up. “I live in Spartanburg,” you’ll say, or some variant on that. And almost inevitably, you’ll be meet with some dismissive joke, [...]
Earlier today, I interviewed John Warner, the founder of InnoVenture LLC and the regional online business community site SwampFox. Even though we’re in completely different fields and operating on completely different scales, it was a surprisingly refreshing conversation, in large part because Warner has a clear passion for creating a forum where regional businesses, innovators [...]
Just after the close of Monday’s City Council meeting, I was giving a light-hearted ribbing to one of the City staff about their lack of video coverage of their own meetings. It happened to be on my mind because the nearby city of Asheville — which have been broadcasting their City Council meetings live on [...]
Each Wednesday, I like talk about some “Big Idea” for Spartanburg. While most are intended as springboards for larger community discussion of a specific issue — a citywide smoking ban, finding a means to market Spartanburg’s potential, revitalizing a single street in Spartan Mills or even late-in-the-day bid for the Google Fiber Initiative — it’s [...]
Does Spartanburg need a downtown smoking ban? Over the past year or so, I’ve been approached by perhaps a half-dozen people, each of whom has suggested in their own way — ranging from blunt activist assertion to subtle hint — that I write a post where I take a firm stand on the City’s lack [...]
A few weeks ago, I wrote a post about the immense potential of just one forgotten street street on the fringes of downtown Spartanburg. Looking around the neighborhood that surrounded the former site of Spartan Mills, I kept thinking about how people I’ve known in other, more established cities — particularly crafters, artists and small [...]
In early February, internet behemoth Google announced a new campaign to “build and test ultra high-speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the United States.” In this case, “ultra high-speed” means a fiber-to-home network with speeds in the 1 gigabit per second range, roughly 100 times the speed of a standard [...]
Several months ago, I heard a rumor that the Virginia College of Osteopathic Medicine was looking at the old Spartan Mills site as a possible location for their proposed Spartanburg Campus. At the time, I didn’t realize exactly what that meant, at least beyond a simple understanding that a new college campus was likely to [...]
As the various members of the Spark team experiment with their own variations on video blogs, I thought it was high time to post a video blog about how Spartanburg could benefit from a few more voices in the local video blogging community. Which brings us to this week’s Big Idea: Spartanburg needs more video [...]
