DaytonMostMetro.com began in August 2006 as a grassroots site aimed at promoting the urban core of Dayton – from the perspective of those who actually live there (starting with me). At the time, the Downtown Dayton Partnership had a very dated and boring website that only focused on the Central Business District (which has since been upgraded and now includes the Oregon District), and there didn’t seem to be a good site that people could find info on venues and events in the downtown area.
I got the idea for DMM when living part time in the German Village neighborhood of Columbus (their version of the residential part of the Oregon District). In researching Columbus I stumbled upon ColumbusRetroMetro.com (now defunct) and was impressed with the interactive maps and a ton of good info that made it easy for an outsider to explore the urban core of Columbus. I eventually met the founder Paul Bonneville and at that time we talked about possibly creating DaytonRetroMetro.com using his database and interface structure. He was very busy with keeping up with his own site and city though and I soon made the decision to create my own site for Dayton, and DMM was born. At that time, DMM was very similar to ColumbusRetroMetro with neighborhood sections, maps and blogs.
A couple of years into it with a few guest contributors that came and went and the addition of an online forum for open free-flow conversation, I overhauled the site and with the help of a group of volunteers from updayton we transformed DMM into more of an online magazine. Much of our focus remains on the urban core but the site no longer has geographic boundaries as we cover things happening all over the Dayton Region. This time, it was another well established Columbus site that served as inspiration: ColumbusUnderground.com. This site was created by Walker Evans and has been around for nine years, growing into a true community site focused on all things Columbus. If you want to learn more about our larger neighbor city to the east, I highly recommend ColumbusUnderground.com. This is a great resource that definitely has a finger on the pulse of Columbus, and from the video below it looks like it continues to grow.
As for DMM – we too will continue to grow with more contributors and more stories about things happening everywhere in and around Dayton. And if you have suggestions as to how to make our site better, we want to hear from you. Just like ColumbusUnderground.com is to Columbus, we want DMM to be the community resource for the Dayton Region.
(Thanks to Seth from For The Love Of Dayton who posted the video link on a Esrati.com post featuring DMM)
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