It's a Blogworld After All

The North Coast Journal cover article on local blogging is out and online, with my first-person contribution. At the moment at least, the online version has no hot links (although I supplied a bunch, so that may come later in the day.) So if anyone who got here by way of the article, welcome, and if you are curious about my very first blog entry, it's here at Blue Voice. It was supposed to be the first of a series of comic riffs on the mythical town of Pluto, California, but for some reason I never did another one. Good idea, though. Maybe? Maybe I'll revisit it.

If you're curious about my other blogs, they're linked in the column to the left here, just below the ads. I love the ads. I haven't seen a penny from them, but I'm interested in how they change. Sometimes they accurately reflect the subject of a post, but at other times trying to figure out why they're there is mind-boggling, if not hilarious.

So far (just after noon on publication day) traffic to this site hasn't changed noticeably. Maybe a few more hits from Humboldt, along with the usual, like one from an Air Force base in Langley, VA, home of the CIA. Thanks to free online tools, anybody can engage in their own domestic spying, or counterspying.

Bob Doran begins the blogging article with an anecdote about Judy at his dentist not knowing what blogging is. Of course, given Arcata's size, I also know Judy, and I go to the same dentist.
Here on the coast of far northern California, trends arrive fully formed from elsewhere, late. When I arrived in 1996 there was but one cafe in town (a small one that doubled as the place you paid for a hottub) and not counting the donut shop. Now there are at least four more in Arcata, and as happened in Seattle in the 80s and Pittsburgh in the early 90s, they started small and local and have branched out.

Of course we're glad if some trends never get here. The landscape outside of town is the landscape I remember outside of my hometown in Pennsylvania when I was a child: green grass and cows. Now the western PA highway a fifty mile continuous commercial free-fire zone of fast food, malls, shopping centers, big boxes and so on, from the Laurel Highlands right into Pittsburgh.

Online trends are the most evanescent; they exist in cyberspace, which takes intention and special equipmet to go there. Otherwise it, or any portion of it, doesn't exist. Personally I haven't even dipped a toe in the water of podcasts or podcasting. Hey, I just learned to use a little basic html for my dkos etc. posts. I want to bask in a sense of accomplishment for awhile before I venture farther.

Thanks in particular to Fred, who wrote about local blogs in his blog, including one of mine, and who posts comments here, I do read several of the local blogs. (So naturally there is a discussion, including fuming, about the story going on at his blog.) As a newspaper reader I would have liked to see other bloggers voices in the story, as the Journal did last week with young local artists (a fascinating story by Helen Sanderson. ) I didn't see any of the blogging piece before publication, apart from the thousand words I was asked to write. I'm not complaining, just saying.

But now I need to accelerate the day's schedule so I'll be ready to talk to a radio documentarian in Australia this afternoon. He's interviewing me on Wal-Mart, the malling of America and related subjects, due principally to my review of Wal-Mart books in the SF Chronicle Sunday, but also an op-ed piece I did for the LA Times, "The Great Malls of China." Apparently when China sneezes, Australia gets bird flu. I get interviewed now and then, though they tend to come in clumps, and not always because I've published something new. I do them partly because I usually learn at least as much from the person interviewing me as they do from me.