802 Online Archives

Since 802 Online lives somewhere else now, I thought I'd change the name of this blog. And I've doctored the photo, too, because I started a fun blog and haven't figured out some of the technological tricks yet. So, uh, go see one of my other blogs.

802 Online has a new home. Our art director/webmaster Don Eggert customized a site for me over at typepad, and I've officially moved. I haven't exported my blogger content there yet, but may move some of it. The site is still evolving, but I've started posting there, and we're officially launching it next Wednesday. Check it out and leave me lots of comments.

The site's official new address is http://7d.blogs.com/802online. Mine is the first 7D blog, but there are more to come, some of which are already in the works. The 7d.blogs.com site will be the hub. Any suggestions you have for what we should add next are of course welcome. Thanks for reading!

I'm back from my trip. Had a great time. Thanks, everybody, for the well wishes. I'm working frantically on my 7D site, coming very soon. Looking forward to doing more original online reporting, and expanding our understanding of what constitutes the Vermont blogosphere.

Stay tuned!

I'm headed to Seattle for six days for a much-needed vacation. We'll be launching the Seven Days site when I return, possibly next week. Stay tuned!

"Should municipalities get in the wi-fi business?" is an article from the SF Chronicle, via Common Dreams, by Adam Werbach. He's id'd as a member of the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, but he's also the guy who was elected prez of the Sierra Club when he was 23 a few years back.

So now he's advocating for Municipal Wi-fi, and warning San Franciscans about the coming PR onslaught from big biz. Here's a quote: "During the next year of planning, you're going to be bombarded with messages about how the incompetent, bloated city bureaucracy is going to chase businesses from our town and waste millions of dollars on a fool's quest." Any of this sound familiar, Burlington?

Bill from Candleblog directed me to this moody short film, shot at The Clothing Line, a funky thrift store on Cherry Street. I took a few minutes out of my crazy deadline-day fog to watch it, and so should you.

I ran into Darren Allen, of Hall Monitor fame unexpectedly on Saturday, at the R.U.1.2? Annual Dinner and Silent Auction at the Wyndham. I think he got tired of me introducing him to everyone as "Vermont's first paid journalist blogger." But he is!

And it sounds like his site is a success. Allen says that every time he posts something negative about the governor, he gets a response from press secretary Jason Gibbs in, like, five minutes. And he stirred up a hornets' nest last week with his — incorrect, it turns out — insinuation that Democracy for America canceled a press conference with Bernie Sanders because of a story in the Bennington Banner about Bernie paying his wife and step daughter for consulting services. Apparently there was actually a scheduling conflict (and is Bernie's reimbursement of their services really that big a deal anyway? He may be occasionally obnoxious, but he's no Tom DeLay.) Allen says he got lots of angry phone calls from the Sanders people and from DFA, so apparently he's got some influential readers.

Allen says the marketing people tell him 1000 unique visitors regularly check his blog, though he's not exactly sure what that means. He estimated that so far, his daily traffic high is about 2,500. That's a lot of hits for Vermont, peeps. Candleblog gets about 100 on a great day; I get about 30.

Allen also reports that no, he's not edited, and yes, he has posted live from the statehouse via wi-fi. So my Freedomworks press conference post was probably not the first journalist blogger posting from the statehouse. Alas, are there any Vermont journalist/blogging firsts still up for grabs?

Vermonter Tom Dumont of Tom's Astronomy Blog regularly posts about all things astronomical. Here's a particularly lovely moon photo he took last night.

Has anybody else happened upon Twenty-Something, a blog by a Vermonter who calls himself "Crash?" I linked to him earlier this week when he posted an entry about being recognized at 135 Pearl, Burlington's only gay bar. Well today he's got a post up about how he's taking a break from blogging for a little while. It's a pity, because he's a good writer.

I base this opinion on an entry he wrote last week about a tortured high school relationship and how he came out to his mom. It's good stuff. Warning: this link will take you to a site with some riveting — though sexually explicit — language.

Maybe I'll run into him tomorrow night at the RU12? Annual Dinner and Silent Auction.

Born April 15, 2004.

The college, not the cigarettes.

VT's own rarin' librarian spoke to a group at Marlboro College last week about — what else — the intersection of libraries and technology. She's posted an outline of her presentation, "Librarian Eye for the Tech Buy: thinking about technology and libraries and Vermont all at once" on her website. Anybody interested in public computing resources at Vermont libraries should check it out.

She points out, yet again, that according to the stats from the governor's telecommunication plan, nearly 2% of Vermonters have never heard of the internet.

Interesting article from morph: The Media Center blog about the difficulties of integrating blogs into newspaper operations. Ken Sands makes some good points, among them that blogs should focus on specific topics rather than personalities.

For the most part I agree, but I think the best blogs are the ones that are very specific and allow their authors to share their personality. I like it that NTodd posts pictures of his dogs and cats on Dohiyi Mir. They humanizes the content of his site in a way that transcends the coldly impersonal nature of both print journalism and the computer experience.

I strive for that balance, too, though perhaps I tilted too far toward the personal when I wrote about my colonoscopy.

Kidding. I don't really think I was going too far.

UPDATE: From NationalJournal.com, a column about how the dynamic of "bloggers vs. mainstream media" is misleading.