Kerri's Cupcakes - Hot Cocoa Marshmallow

Kerri’s Kupcakes

Every holiday we order cupcakes from Kerri. It’s St Patricks day and the Guinness cupcakes didn’t last long enough for a picture. The Hot Cocca cupcakes in the picture were from Christmas and tasted better than they looked.  You don’t have to wait for a holiday or special occasion to taste these treats.  Be a fan of Kerri’s Kupcakes on Facebook and order yours today

Kerri’s Kupcakes – http://www.kerriskupcakes.com/

Juan Mosquea "Wonderland" 2010

A group exhibition of new work by artists David Gold, Gordon Lafler, Juan Mosquea, and Michelle Nigro.

With a blend of pop surrealism and low brow sensibilities, ”Out There” is a showcase of four Long Island-based artists new to FRESH.  Influenced by his studies in psychology, David Gold’s odd mindscape oil paintings recall  Yves Tanguy and early Dali.  Gordon Lafler creates playful monsters and creatures while Juan Mosquea conjurs up the nightmares of Saturday Morning Cartoons. Michelle Nigro’s “Cleopatra” is a lithograph rendering of a screenshot from the 1932 film “Freaks”.

Through April 5th

Opening Night Live Music by The Michael Jazz Trio

FRESH at Toast Coffeehouse 242 E Main St Port Jefferson, NY 11777



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The Huntington town board on Long Island recently voted down plans for a $100 million, 490-unit housing development, partly on the strength of media-savvy opponents who took developers by surprise.

“We were a bunch of moms,” said Jennifer LaVertu, an opposition leader. “I didn’t even have to be home to do it. We could access Facebook by phone, dropping a message to everyone that we needed them at town hall that night for a protest. It helped us organize much more quickly.”

Well beyond Long Island, development opponents have created social media sites to trumpet their cause and gather like-minded neighbors. In Richmond, Va., residents have established a “Don’t Big Box Carytown” site to fight the conversion of a two-story office building into a retail center. A group in the Chicago neighborhood of Wrigleyville, near the home of baseball’s Cubs, also is fighting development through Facebook.

Now the real estate industry is debating whether to join the cyberspace fray to fight future not-in-my-backyard opposition like what happened in Huntington.

“Everybody in the industry was taken by surprise,” said Desmond Ryan, executive director of the Association for a Better Long Island, a business trade group that backed the developer. He criticized local elected leaders for caving to critics.

The development would have been about a half-mile from a Long Island Rail Road station — ideal for people who need affordable housing close to public transport.

Opponents argued, though, that the project would balloon school enrollment and attract low-income residents. They hung signs on fences and protested at town meetings but didn’t really make an impact until they enlisted social media.

The town board needed at least four of its five members to vote in favor of the application by AvalonBay Communities Inc., which owns 50,000 apartments nationwide, for the project to move forward. The September vote was 3-2, stunning backers of the development.

One town board member, Mark Cuthbertson, said he voted against the project in part because of concerns about its impact on school enrollment. He conceded that opposition lobbying on Facebook “was definitely a factor.”

Vivienne Wong, an Avalon opponent, described the group’s success as “a monumental win for the little guy. It was a great moment for the Internet to show that things can change; we were able to use these tools to bring the little man a victory.”

Richard Guardino, a former Long Island town supervisor and the current dean of Hofstra’s Breslin Center for Real Estate Studies, agreed the intensity of the opposition was a surprise.

“You had a developer who was caught off guard, and it happened very quickly,” Guardino said. “It looked like things were proceeding routinely when all of a sudden there was significant opposition that became very vocal.”

Real estate developers are realizing that they have to be geared up and ready to respond, he said.

“Without a doubt it’s the wave of the future; it’s something you need to embrace,” said developer David Blumenfeld, the builder of an 800,000-square-foot Long Island shopping center called The Arches, as well as a huge retail development on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

“Every post you put on Facebook has to be an attention-grabber,” he said. “It’s got to be something visual and it needs to attract people, to bring them over to your side.”

Facebook, which has a half-billion users, does not compile statistics on civic groups using its site for such purposes, spokeswoman Malorie Lucich said.

Matt Whalen, regional vice president for AvalonBay, insists social media was not the prime reason the project was killed but concedes it was a factor. He said it became difficult to shoot down rumors that the project was intended for low-income residents and other criticisms, including whether it was actually close enough to the train station to be considered a “transit-oriented development.”

“The dangerous thing that we saw about social media in our case was that it really just allowed for a wide distribution of any kind of information that’s not factually checked,” he said. “The people in these social mediums can basically say whatever they want.”

Not everyone is convinced that firing back is good strategy.

“We’ve been very nervous,” developer Mitchell D. Rechler said. “The good news is you can get the facts out, but what we’ve also seen is that the facts can continually get buried with misinformation.

“Do you really want to … respond to every single comment that comes through? Is that the best way to dedicate your time and money? I don’t personally think so.”

___

Associated Press news researcher Monika Mathur in New York contributed to this report.

—Copyright 2010 Associated Press

A great example of how social media marketing works really well for local long island business is Billie’s 1890 Facebook Fan Page. Last year when their fan page was only 3 months old it had very few fans. At the same time they were hosting a fund raiser Billie’s Fight to Knock out Breast Cancer. The event page had many more confirmed guests attending than their fan page had fans. All due to social media marketing, the event was coming up within weeks and everyone was RSVPing and inviting others. They had a great turn out that night, raised a lot of money and largely due to social media and facebook.

Every business should have a fan page these days.Have you noticed how TV commercials are now asking people to find them on facebook rather than putting their company URL in the commercial? Fan Pages can be customized using facebook markup language, you can integrate your pages with Google Analytics and get lots of information about your fans and work to get higher conversations with that data.

Twitter is another great tool to reach out to your target audience. Twitter lets you post a short message 140 characters long just about the length of a text message. On Twitter you will want to have people following you so they can receive your tweets or short messages. Airlines and Cruise companies use it to post limited discounts on traveling. Restaurants post daily specials. The possibilities are limitless with social media marketing, if you aren’t already part of these networks start now and create your profiles and accounts.

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Earlier this year we received an email from a business owner who needed help, and SEO for their website. Since that first email arrived up until to today we’ve been working with the client to help them increase their websites ranking in Google, for various keywords related to their industry. They needed help with their website marketing, and we delivered.

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Amityville Horror House

The house made famous by the 1970s movie Amityville Horror is now for sale in Long Island, New York, with an asking price of $1.15 million.

The five bedroom house located at 108 Ocean Ave, Amityville NY, gained notoriety from the movie which was based on the story of the Lutz family, who claimed the house was haunted after they moved into it 1975.

Several months earlier, six members of another family had been shot and killed as they slept in the house. The family’s eldest son, Ronald DeFeo Jr, was convicted of the 1974 murders.

The Dutch Colonial style home overlooking a canal has had several owners since the 1970s and the address has been changed from the original 112 Ocean Avenue in an effort to keep onlookers away. But locals say there are still crowds of people around Halloween.

But it was a bad buy for George and Kathleen Lutz and their three children. They claimed that they were subjected to a terrifying supernatural ordeal with walls oozing slime, sinister images appearing on the walls, a plague of flies and a crucifix turning upside down before their eyes.

Mr Lutz said he was awoken every night at 3.15am, the time of the DeFeo killings, and that he had seen his wife levitate from the bed. He also reported that his five year old daughter was visited by a demonic, pig like creature with glowing eyes.

The couple called in a Catholic priest, Father Ralph Pecoraro, who insisted he had heard a man’s voice telling him to get out as he sprinkled holy water and began to pray.

The family fled the house after only 28 days. Their story was turned into a best selling book by Jay Anson and the 1979 film starring James Brolin and Margot Kidder led to a dozen sequels. Sceptics immediately cast doubt upon the story and the Lutzes fought persistent rumours that it was a money spinning hoax. However, both passed a lie detector test. Other owners have not been troubled. James Cromarty, who lived in the house from 1977 to 1987, said nothing weird ever happened, except for people taking pictures because of the book and the movie.

The house has under gone extensive renovation including the removal of the distinctive quarter windows in the attic that were made to resemble eyes on the film’s poster.

Daniel Gale Sotheby’s International Realty