From the Editor

WHEN WE STARTED OUR BEST OF coverage in 2004, we split it up into two parts. One emphasized retail, goods, services and miscellaneous items, and another, two months later, focused on food and drink. We wrote mainly about what you, the readers, said were your favorites, based on the results of our annual readers' ballot poll, and we tossed in a few editors' choices. In 2005, we held to that formula, but we invited the entire Alameda Magazine staff to vote to determine our staff picks in Best Of categories. In both cases, editors' and staff picks were in the same categories in which readers were voting.
All that's been thrown out the window for our 2006 Best of Alameda issue.
Now before you have a conniption fit and go apoplectic, listen to what we are doing. First, we're revealing all of the Best Of winners now, in one great issue, so there's not another minute of waiting to find out the food and drink results. You can read right now whether your fellow Alameda Magazine readers agree on favorites in every category: food, drink, retail, miscellaneous, goods and services.
We're also putting a season-by-season spotlight on what we, the editors, think is the Best of Alameda in "Reasons for the Seasons, Editors' Choices for Winter, Spring, Summer and Fall." It's a campy, calendar-oriented, celebratory look at what we anticipate on the Island every season. We've also come up with our own categories, and so there's no more competition with readers' opinions. Photographer Lori Eanes, a frequent contributor to Alameda Magazine, pulls it all together with arresting images that will make you smile-and get you out and about in Alameda all year long.
Like it? Don't like it? Let me know. Forget to vote? Look for the 2007 readers' choice ballot in the spring, and we'll publish the results next fall.
Besides Best Of coverage, this issue is chock-full of other great reads, among them a profile of the storied basketball history of St. Joseph Notre Dame High School and the man behind Pilots basketball, the late, great coach Frank LaPorte by first-time contributor Marcus W. Thompson II, a sportswriter for the Contra Costa Times. Frequent contributor Keri Hayes Troutman offers up good advice on that most popular of Alameda topics-real estate. Want to know some quick ways to make your home more valuable or how to stretch your dollars on the remodeling, landscaping and redesigning fronts? She tells you how in "Assessing Home Value, What's Yours Worth?"