RiverwestNeighborhood.org, also known as the Riverwest Neighborhood Network, is a long-term experiment--a special project of New Local Media running since 2006. It's a free, independently owned, volunteer- and user-driven community source, filter, and aggregator of local news. It's also a social network with a discussion forum, public events calendar, and classified ads for Milwaukee's Riverwest neighborhood and surrounding areas. Content is automatically syndicated and mapped at Outside.In. Yahoo Pipes, Twitter, Flickr, and Facebook are also used to share content and bring in relevant external material while opening the project to many people's input.

The site design has gone through 3 major versions. It began on Mambo 4.5, converted to Joomla 1.0, and later migrated to Joomla 1.5. It has always used many of the best and most elaborate extensions available for Joomla. In its second major version, the site was designed with a newspaper's architecture. The header showed a different photo on every page load alongside thecurrent date. A tabbed box showed the latest news, most read news, latest classified ads, and the weather. Below that there was a slideshow of special featured articles. Most of the page concerned the latest headlines and news in several categories. After a user logged in, new areas, services, and content appeared that was not available to the public.

Now, in its 2009 form, the site has more of a Web 2.0 design. News is somewhat de-emphasized in favor off user ccreated content, much of which is generated offsite. As in the previous design, at the bottom of the home page Flickr photos about the neighborhood are randomly displayed as thumbnails that link back to the originals. The latest user comments and forum posts are listed, and there are links to the latest headlines from relevant external news sites and blogs. Now there is also a prominent Flickr slideshow and "tweets" from Twitter--both inclue any material that is tagged "riverwest," ensuring a daily supply of not entirely predictable material and conversation. Tweetboard is used for further integration with Twitter, as Facebook widgets and Facebook connect are used for further integration with Facebook.

As in the past, individual user profile pages let registered users control public and private information about their account. News, comments, classified ads, and other things they've posted are listed on a user's profile for other users to see. A "connections" feature allows the site's users to link their profile with others and see who their friends are linked to. There's an internal private messaging system, and users can email each other without making their email addresses public. Previously users that live on your street, have recently joined, or have updated their profiles are shown in a side column. These features have been lost in the current iteration of the site, which still awaits major improvements in its social networking aspects. There is currently a basic user-created and user-moderated "groups" function.

The site puts out a large number of newsfeeds. Twitter rebroadcasts several of them them as short blurbs via Twiterfeed. Facebook's NetworkedBlogs application picks them up and pumps them to the site's Facebook page. Anything an administrator posts to the Facebook page get sent out on the Riverwest Twitter account as well. Yahoo Pipes merges some of the site feeds, parses them for location data, and plots them on a map. Talkr creates an audio podcast for every item in the feed it receives. Feedburner and Feedblitz add a lot of things to the feeds, but their main value is creating an automated email newsletter people can subscribe to. Outside.in maps and geocodes syndicated content from many websites and allows users to browse citywide and neighborhood-level news. Outside.in also offers email newsletters that aggregate the top stories for geographially defined areas, so the site's content can get further distribution that way, and through other sites using Outside.in for publishers, like Milwaukee's FOX6 news.

New additions in the current version of the site include more aggregated hyperlocal third-party material. SpotCrime.com, MPD, and local anti-crime organizations provide timely news and virtually live mapped crime data on a neighborhood watch page. SeeClickFix.com provides a map and reporting tool for non-emergency issues.