Josh Williams

There’s lots of exiting stuff happening with our team here in Vegas. A few weeks ago we launched another Web site and a local television product.

The site is for our company’s alt-weekly/entertainment pub, Las Vegas Weekly. We took the print product as a starting point and added a lot of really nice features. Like the Sun, it has all our home-grown multimedia tools and our video delivery platform we’ve developed, including high definition video delivered over IP. But for the Weekly we really went all out on our data-driven apps.

We want the Weekly to be the definitive entertainment guide in the Valley. To that end, our staff called (and is still growing this list) over 400 restaurants, every major club, dozens of DJs and hundreds of Vegas bands to build massive databases of entertainment options.

My favorite feature is our band guide. Our readers can browse through more than 265 local bands, view profiles of almost 1000 members in those bands by instrument, and listen to or download almost 350 mp3s from those bands. And of course, our main calendar lists all their upcoming shows. I wish there had been a site like this when I lived in D.C.

Oh, and Robin Leach is one of our bloggers. Wild.

The Weekly launch was a whirlwind of a few months. I project managed the operation and, along with Sean Hellwig, built out the Django templates for integration into our CMS.

The television product we launched recently is a series of daily 50-second “news” briefs on VegasTV called “702.tv.”

The clips air during shows like King of the Hill, the Simpons and Oprah. The briefs’ styles play to the audience/timeslot, the story and — because stories come from our various print and Web products – all our different brands.

We archive all the spots here: http://702.tv.

Both of these are in their first phase and have major changes and features coming in the near future.