One of the nice things about Medill's masters program is that one quarter is typically complete immersion into a project. 6 new media students launched goskokie.com on April 23rd. They've been adding features, generating content, pounding the pavement, and thinking up business models like mad. For less then a month's worth of time, those ink stained wretches have put together a damn good site.
While I've been doing occasional low tech troubleshooting on some plumbing, make no mistake they've done 95% of the hard work. One student could be considered a power user, but there's no hacker hiding behind the curtains. And this is a real live site, not a screenshot special.
Their most judicious decision? Selecting geeklog as a platform. Nominally a weblog tool, the dang thing has easily installed plugins for just about everything you can think of.