Keith Whamond

Well, despite the threat of rain and pretty significant storm just to the east in Bridgeport, the first Alive @ Five concert of 2010 went off without a hitch last night.

Soul Asylum and Gin Blossoms played to a huge crowd, and at least one downtown restaurant owner told me that business was very good last night.

Did you go to Alive @ Five? What was your experience? Are you planning on going to the other concerts? Were you able to spot yourself in any of the photos we shot?

Share your experience below! And don’t forget to send us your photos!

Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton

An op-ed piece in The New York Times Thursday slammed Danbury Mayor Mark Boughton over his involvement in the now-infamous “Danbury Eleven” immigration case.

The opinion piece, titled “11 Day Laborers a Mayor Can’t Get Past”, centers around Boughton’s recent efforts to delay the deposition until after the election, citing a schedule that is simply too full.

The final paragraph is damning:

Mr. Boughton’s immigration stance has many supporters locally, but, post-Arizona, the broader politics seem uncertain. Immigration put the mayor on the map politically, but it’s nowhere on his campaign Web site. As for being too busy, being mayor and campaigning can indeed be taxing though perhaps not as arduous as scrounging for work doing day labor. Mr. Boughton was unavailable for an interview Wednesday; he was playing in the annual Mayor’s Cup Golf Tournament.

Read the full piece here.

The weather's looking not-so-good

The city of Stamford has been waiting all year for Alive @ Five to unofficially kick off the summer, but don’t look now: Thunderstorms are predicted to rain down for the better part of the night.

As a relatively new resident of Stamford, I was looking forward to checking out my first-ever Alive @ Five, but now it’s looking like the whole thing may be — sorry for the pun here — a wash.

What about you? Are you planning on going downtown tonight? Has the forecast ruined your plans?

Over the past nine months, we’ve gotten plenty of feedback from our users about our article comments. From a confusing registration process to undefined character limits to posts not displaying, there’s plenty of room for improvement.

Because of your feedback, we’re working hard behind the scenes to completely overhaul our story comments. Eventually, our story comments will be completely different, with real profiles and a far more social experience.

The very first piece of this change begins late Thursday, and though many of the new features and changes will be behind the scenes, I thought you might be interested in what’s going on.

First things first: We’ve updated both our Privacy Policy and our Terms of Service. Please review the new versions closely. If, for any reason, you’d prefer to opt-out of these changes, please e-mail us and we’ll suspend your account.

Now, on to the new stuff!

• Users can now use one username and password to log in to leave a comment on ALL of the sites in the Connecticut Media Group: CTPost.com, DarienNewsOnline.com, FairfieldCitizenOnline.com, GreenwichCitizen.com, GreenwichTime.com, NewCanaanNewsOnline.com, NewMilfordSpectrum.com, NewsTimes.com, NorwalkCitizenOnline.com, StamfordAdvocate.com and Westport-News.com
• The reverse is also true: If you register for any of our sites, you’ll now be able to log in to all of them.

Some things to keep in mind:

• You can’t register an email address or a username that has already been registered on another site
• If you’ve already used the same e-mail address or username across more than one of our sites, don’t worry. You can still use them for now. Sometime in the future, the duplicates will be removed  and you may be asked to choose which username you want to keep.

Pretty amazing statistics from the United States’ dramatic 1-0 victory over Algeria Wednesday morning:

According to Akamai, which caches content for millions of web sites around the world (including the site you’re reading right now), the last minutes of the U.S./Algeria match topped over 11 million visitors per minute on the company’s network. That would replace the inauguration of President Barack Obama as the second-highest Internet traffic ever. The first round of the World Cup remains the current record holder.

Check out this graphic of Internet usage here:

Akamai.com

The late-game dramatics also wreaked havoc with Twitter, according to their official support blog:

status.twitter.com

To be fair, the fact that England’s match against Slovenia was taking place at the same time probably added to the traffic chaos. Still, a pretty remarkable moment for the entire world.

Tip ‘o the hat to Mashable.com for pointing out the Akamai stats.

We’ve all seen them. Anonymous commenter trolling news websites, posting incendiary comments and setting off a raging debate for pages and pages.

You may have even seen some on this very website.

But what makes an anonymous commenter tick? What’s the motivation for posting a comment without leaving your name behind it? Are these commenter gutless, or are they exercising the same First Amendment rights that Americans have enjoyed for hundreds of years?

Boston.com has posted an interesting analysis that may surprise you — and they even got some of these “anonymous” commenters to go on the record.

From the article:

Read the full article here.