On October 26th, 2008, the Boys and Girls Club will hold their annual cycling challenge event.  This is a major fundraiser for the Boys and Girls Club and we’re excited to have our own team this year.

We’re inviting all of you (who can ride the 31 miles at an easy pace) to join our team.  It costs $100 to signup, and all the money will go to charity.  We’re working on getting everyone on our team tshirts.  To signup, go here and make sure you select “cVillain/Spicy Bear Media” as your affiliation.

Read more about the Boys and Girls Club.

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I was talking with someone from one of the 5th District campaigns (i.e. Goode or Perriello) and they offered to do an online questionnaire for cVillain readers.  Here’s what we will do.  Let us know in the comments what questions you want asked.  If you like someone else’s question, put a @4 where 4 corresponds to the comment number to let us know you like it.

We’ll pick the best/most liked 10 and submit the same questiosn to each campaign, give them a week to respond and publish the answers on the site.

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We had an old copy of the C-VILLE laying around in our offices.   Our offices are in this building.  Do these covers look similar to anyone?

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Hello Everyone,

I think it’s very important for us to involve you in this process. Over at Spicy Bear, we are trying to figure out the right thing to do for cVillain, cvilleStyle and cvilleMUSE. It’s been a lot of fun working with the 15+ regular writers and the hundreds of supporters, and tens of thousands of readers. But, we’ve hit a wall with what we can do.

Our sites continue to be incredibly popular. Just for cVillain, over the last month we had 16,000 unique visitors, 140,000 page views, 41,000 visits and 400+ RSS readers.  Over 80% of these readers are from the Charlottesville area. We’ve thrown relatively few resources at the sites in the last year or so, but now we think it’s time to explore options.

Spicy Bear needs to grow into a more mature organization. We didn’t realize it needed several people working on it full time. We recognize that we’ve taken it as far as we can without bringing in a professional team. That professional team can do things like throw more events, fix technical issues (e.g. archives and comment delay), fix comment formatting, do better reporting and make the experience better for everyone.

For this reason, we’ve been talking to several local companies about acquiring Spicy Bear. We don’t know if that’s the right move, but we do know that we have great people involved and they deserve to pay their bills.  The truth is, we need someone bigger than us to make this their baby. That someone has to be a good fit for the Spicy Bear vision and we’ve been very clear about that.

We will continue to help out that new partner for as long as they need, but we wanted to put this out there for critique and to seek ideas.
If you want to contact me personally or have other ideas please email me at kyle@spicybear.com.

Thanks for understanding,

Kyle and the Spicy Bears

[pic from flickr]

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Hello everyone, we had some updates on Spicy Bear we wanted to share with you. Between DIGG, exciting articles at MUSE on Jazz and the Preston Ave venue, new writers at Style and a new hire, we’re really excited. All the info is after the break..

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On June 30th, 2008, Dave Matthews Band’s saxophonist, LeRoi Moore got into an ATV accident that sent him to the University of Virginia hospital.  He had left the hospital, only to return a few days later. His condition was not good and word was that things weren’t going well.

We do not know the details, but have verified from two independent sources that this is in fact true.   I talked with Bruce Flohr, who confirmed his death several moments ago.

LeRoi, rest in peace and in your and Dave Matthews Band honor we won’t write anything on the site for tomorrow.  LeRoi died at the young age of 46.

More details available over at cvilleMUSE.

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Hello everyone, I think you probably read the article in the latest cover story in the C-VILLE titled “Is this the new face of evil? With cVillain.com, owner Kyle Redinger is either trashing old media or reigniting it. You decide.”

It’s exciting to get on the cover of a newspaper like this and I’m thankful to Cathy, Scott and Bill and all the other folks that were involved in the production of this article.  I wanted to make a couple of points about the article and answer any questions anyone may have.

• We love Spicy Bear.  There are so many people involved, I can’t even begin to thank everyone, but everyone deserves a pat on the back.  All of our sites take a lot of involvement from “editors,” from writers, from commenters and from readers.  I wish the article had emphasized more about the community, because it’s not like we are building this thing in a vacuum.
• I do not think that newspapers and other traditional media are going to die, nor do I trash traditional journalism. The in-depth journalism and reporting will always be a cornerstone of media.  The internet is changing things really quickly, but I don’t look down on old media. I do believe they need to undergo dramatic change to appeal to a more open, socially driven space.
• I was told the headline was going to be “King of New Media” or something along those lines, so the headline was a little surprising to me. Nonetheless, it was pretty fun to do that shot and, trust me, it’s hard to keep a straight face when you have a 6 inch flame in your face.  Jackson Smith did the shots.
• Tom Daly actually took our shot for Business Week.
• I also wish the article had mentioned Francesco a little bit more, because he is my business partner and every bit as instrumental in thinking about business stuff as I am.
• I don’t think I’m evil.
• Remember if you are unhappy with the site, you are invited to participate however you want.

Any more questions? If you ask them in the comments I will happily answer them during the day.

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Virginia Tourism will be at Charlottesville’s The Paramount Theater on Thursday, August 21 from 9:00 AM to 4:00 PM to meet Charlottesville businesses that benefit from tourism. Their intended goal is to “drive business to every restaurant, retail shop, lodging, event and attraction that is visitor-friendly.”  They are in town to do one on one meetings with you.

They wanted us to let you know the details.  I have more detailed information after the break..

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Hello everyone.  I am pleased to announce the latest addition to our Spicy Bear website mix.

Today, I bring you LoveCVILLE, a Charlottesville social news website.   Much like DIGG or REDDIT, you can publish links to your favorite websites, news articles and information about Charlottesville and let other community members vote for them by clicking on the Love It box.  We’re letting Charlottesville create its own homepage/frontpage.  Have fun!

Head on over, submit an article, vote on a few and let us know what you think.  It’s still in BETA so it will probably break.

All of your cVillain logins should work.  Let us know if you have any issues.

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Thanks to everyone who made it out. Special thanks to Tuesday for planning everything! Extra special thanks to everyone at Escafe and big kudos for giving everyone a $10 dollar gift certificate who showed up!

I have all the pictures after the break, but Escafe wanted to ask you guys “what does it take to turn their place into a dancing joint?!”

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