More exciting news from the Joomlasphere:  Joomla Milwaukee starts meeting later this month!

The first meeting will be January 29 at 11:45 a.m. at the Milwaukee Research Park.   Sign up online, or send an email to info at joomlamilwaukee.com.

Joomla Milwaukee is putting the finishing touches on their website and it is expected to be launched any day now.

(Do you know about other local Joomla

Coming back from the CMS Expo in Denver, one very clear message is that there's an enormous opportunity for communities and neighborhoods and municipalities to use Joomla to communicate their content on the web.

I think this is an especially interesting proposition for the Chicago community -- after all, we are the "City of Neighborhoods."

BTW - Click here for a very cool poster of Chicago

I wrote a post yesterday about all the Joomla groups in big brainy cities. Several people pointed out that small brainy cities have Joomla groups, too! Hear, hear!

On that note, the possibility of a Joomla group for suburban Chicago was broached. I want to add two observations to that.

First, we would be delighted to assist in helping to branch towards the northern suburbs. We have a

Joomla-istas are technology lovers. So you'll all want to go to Chicago's Millennium Park and check out the Wired Nextfest.

There are some very cool robots that you can program and turn loose! And how about some no-touch presentation screens, a la "Minority Report"?

There's a whole range of technologies on display, from Xerox's down-to-earth printer ink solutions to NASA's out-of-this-world

I saw this statement in the New York Times yesterday and I thought it perfectly summed up why Chicago is the place for commercially meaningful web applications to be born: "Web services start-ups . . . use simple, off-the-shelf technologies and cost very little to get up and running. Their business advantage comes from their Web sites' artistic design and ease of use, and their challenge is

One of the things that has been fascinating to me about the development of Joomla! Chicago, and the Joomla! EXPO in May, is the interaction it has given us with the marketing, design, and development communities in surrounding states, and with growing hubs of Joomla activity in Milwaukee, Detroit, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and other cities.

One of the coolest things happening at the Chicago Public Library is a program where dedicated staff members help the public use the Internet at branches around the city.   They're called "cybernavigators" !  They give all kinds of assistance, ranging from simply giving a helping hand in searching the net to extended one-on-one training sessions in computer use (the latter by appointment).

To see

Anyone who has any doubts about where Chicago is headed, just check out http://ctabustracker.com  -- it shows how long until the bus arrives at your stop . . . and you can even see a map with the location of all the buses near you on your route.  (Even cooler on Blackberry.) ((And don't even talk to me about iPhone.))

It's enough to make a person with ditch their car and start using mass transit!

Did anybody notice that on practically the same day Anheiser Busch got bought out by InBev and St. Louis lost a major corporate citizen, Chicago announced the HQ of Miller Coors will move here?

True story:  years ago, when I was just out of college and on a business trip to visit Brown Shoe Company in St. Louis,  we were all out to lunch in some joint, and as the waitress went around the table