Our Blog: where do you stand?

Twittering 40

By: Susan Iskiwitch | 12/17/2007

The Where Do You Stand? readers who make their homes outside of St. Louis may not be aware of the doom about to be faced by nearly all St. Louis-area residents on January 2, 2008. All lanes of 1-64/US40, the main artery for St. Louis commuters, will close in both directions between Ballas Road and I-170 before morning rush hour on January 2 and will remain closed for the entire year. The following year, another several-mile-long portion of the highway will be shut down.

Our friends at KSDK have so kindly created what I like to call a doomsday countdown on their Web site: as I write, there are 15 days, 09 hours, 4 minutes and 44 seconds until the highway closure.

Since I live on one side of where Highway 40 will be shut down and Standing Partnership's office is on the other side, I have begun Twittering about the shutdown's effect on my commute for the St. Louis Post Dispatch.

My updates as well as the updates of several area commuters (as recruited by Kurt Greenbaum, the Post's director of social media), are aggregated into one Twitter event page called Hwy40 and will also appear on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Highway 40 Special Report. As Kurt pointed out, MTV did something similar with coverage of the Video Music Awards.

Follow the Hwy40 page as well as SusanIskOff40's individual updates to see how the St. Louis area adapts to this significant change in our daily lives.

Posted in Social Media, Digital Communications