One year ago, we announced Ph.ly, a locally-minded URL shortener that was also home to an experiment: a weekly email service that promised to share the three biggest, most meaningful journalism stories in Philadelphia.

We called it the Ph.ly/NewsWeekly and after getting a rush of some 1,500 subscribers to start, the service has slowly grown to more than 1,700 weekly subscribers.

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Now that we’ve closed the third annual Philly Tech Week Presented by AT&T, we immediately get the questions about IMPACT.

Who came? What happened? What’s next? The short answer is nearly 20,000 people attended, almost double last year, with nearly 200 partners and 105 events.

We’ll get survey results on this post as we get those answers in, but we’ll start bringing things together here.

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Four years after first launching a simple WordPress theme (thanks Woothemes for Typebased from 2008!) to serve as the home of TechnicallyPhilly.com, we are launching a rebrand as Technical.ly, which will be the replacement for the Philly theme and our Baltimore site, a custom theme called StartupBmore from our partner there Mike Brenner.

Consider it a proof of concept that went a little further than a proof of concepts usually go.

Ahead of launching our new site, and a year after we purchased the Technical.ly domain, we wanted to share some lessons from using the same theme for that time.

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In the inaugural Baltimore Innovation Week, our community pulled together more than 30 events, 25 partners and 1,500 attendees over 10 days.

Read the full status report on Technically Baltimore here.

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In what is now a yearly tradition, at the end of every April we organize Philly Tech Week, a week-long celebration of technology in Philadelphia.

Now that we’re more than a month removed from 2012′s big event we’d like to share statistics in the interest of transparency.

While some events measure success by seemingly ambiguous metrics based on a mix of attendees and marketing reach, we like to focus on the infallible measurement of actual human beings that actually attended an event. A tweet about Philly Tech Week is not the same as someone that attended. A newspaper article’s circulation is not the same as an attendee, either.

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In the fourth edition of Whiskey Chats, we speak to Neil Budde, new CEO of the Philadelphia Public Interest Information Network (its history, here), housed at the Center for Public Interest Journalism.

We talked to him about his history at the WSJ.com (Wall Street Journal) and at Yahoo News, and about what he plans to do with the new organization.

Whiskey Chats — 04 — Neil Budde

There was a time when Technically Philly was ashamed of the number of likes we had on our Facebook page. With a little bit of work we were quickly able to quadruple the number of folks that interact with our page.

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When it comes to branding an online property, one of the first things you should consider in the process of naming an entity is the availability of a possible domain name.

Like good real estate, the neighborhood and address you land at can help your online property thrive.

But good real estate gets speculated quickly, and with a finite number of memorable and catchy domain names available in the top-level .com domain spectrum, many brands are looking to international domains as an additional resource.

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For a room of Leadership Inc. class members, our Christopher Wink discussed why budding corporate and nonprofit leaders should take personal use of social media a bit more seriously than some may think.

See the presentation slides above or see them here.

Campus Philly is a small, regional nonprofit dedicated to a mission of attracting, engaging and retaining college graduates to the Philadelphia area.

Their mission rocks; they host popular events and lead interesting research.

Yet, in summer 2011, even they said their website sucked, and they had no clear strategy about what to do with it anyway.

Their platform was a dated, proprietary Lotus framework, their editorial interns had little focus for their content and the organization’s social strategy wasn’t much more than an afterthought from a busy staff.

Our job was to get their web strategy a little bit closer to the expectations set for an otherwise interesting and meaningful group that is the envy of graduate-retention program throughout the country. In six months time, from June to December, Technically Media did just that, by focusing on three clear efforts:

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