Home
 |
|
| ||||||||
|
|
|
|
|
||||
| ||||||||
 |
|
|
|
Got something to say? Say it in a blog Local residents discuss technology, politics, parenting, relationships and art, all on a personal level September 14, 2005 By DANE GOLDEN
(Editor's note: The Argus-Courier has no control over the content on Web sites described in this article. As they are largely journals describing personal thoughts or opinions, they may include content some readers find objectionable.)
What's your favorite blog? Blogs, or Web logs, are the online journals that have been growing like wildfire over the past few years. LiveJournal.com, Blogger.com and MySpace.com provide free space to writers who want to tell the whole world, or no one at all, just what they're interested in. Friends, family, coworkers, people with shared interests and random folks from all over the Web find out about these blogs either by recommendation, keyword searches or links from other blogs. They read and sometimes give online feedback on what is said on the blog. Sometimes, bloggers don't disclose their identities, lending to an almost completely anonymous exchange between writer and reader. And Petaluma netizens, like residents of other tech-savvy cities, have gotten into blogging in a big way. What are they blogging about? The subjects are as varied as the individuals writing about them.
One Petaluma blogger, Jordan Rosenfeld, is a writer in the real world, too. She's also an editor, teacher and radio show host, and sometimes writes for Petaluma Magazine, which is published by the Argus-Courier. Her blog can be found at Rosenfeld originally started blogging as a way to create a series of links to articles she had written and a few other notes. But she gradually found that she was beginning to gain a regular audience, and began to see her blog as a way of connecting with new people who would sometimes read her in print. "It evolved into something about my own pursuits as a writer," she said. Her blog now covers fiction writing, journalism and her radio show on KRCB called "Word by Word," where she interviews fiction and non-fiction authors. She also writes daily musings about her life, of course, as most other blogs do. "I see it as an extension of me into the world," said Rosenfeld. "Kind of a persona. You start to learn something about me as a writer." "The blog is a crossover between the personal sphere of opinion and the informative sphere," she said. "I think they've emerged because journalism is a world where you have to report, but there aren't a lot of forums for personal opinion."
Ryan Boren, Boren's blog talks about Web development, the nature of blogging, telecom, WordPress developments and, of course, his life in general. Boren said that blogs have become so successful because "people want to have their own little voice out there. You can meet some people who share your interests, and it can scale from something very personal to something very public."
Petaluman Sharon Hughes is a radio show host who has been blogging for a year. She gets comments from people all around the world who haven't heard her show. They just find her blog at "It's a tool for the grassroots to get the truth out there, report the part of the story that the liberal mainstream media isn't getting out," she said. "Blogging is great because you can get your opinion out there. Anybody can blog, and anybody can write whatever they want. "It has been amazing to see. I get as many hits on my blog as on my Web site. What I'm learning is that for a whole group of people, blogging is their thing. They don't watch TV, they don't listen to the radio." In her Aug. 24 blog, Hughes wrote that "(New York Times writer Elisabeth) Bumiller keeps in step with the rest of the MSM (mainstream media) in not mentioning Sheehan's original positive statements of her meeting with the President in 2004. We're still hard-pressed to find any mention of Cindy Sheehan's anti-American statements by any of the alphabet or major print news agencies." Hughes said that her blogged comments about Sheehan's comments were further commented on by AirAmerica, who she said misquoted her. National political news stories are quoting blogs more frequently these days. So if there is such a thing as a great national debate, blogs are now a fundamental part of that discussion. Lori Bowen Ayre doesn't allow comments on her blog. She said she gets too much spam, which is a common problem.
Ayre, a consultant and project manager, writes a blog on library technology, which can be found at Like most blogs, hers speaks to an insider crowd. Recently, she has been blogging about library-specific privacy and freedom of speech issues, such as filtering of web-connected library computers, and RFID, which will track books like bar codes in a store.
A few years back, people used to say that "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog." Well, Ross Lockhart's dog, a shih tzu named Maddie, gets a lot of attention on his blog, Lockhart is a graduate student in creative writing at San Francisco State, and his "photo blog" includes many photos of his daily constitutionals with Maddie. Recently, he displayed photos of some things he found at Wickersham Park (but didn't touch -- too gross). The items included a rotten apple, a house key and a bottle of aspirin. Lockhart's been blogging for a couple of years.
Jennie Kadrioski, "It's pretty much my therapy outlet," she said. The project started out as a way to keep her family up to date when she and her husband moved away from Michigan. "But they didn't really get the concept," she said. It started as a journal about her life as a junior high librarian, but now it's about motherhood, current events, movies and books. "I have about 50 hard core readers," she said, which are random people who found her over time from around the country, Canada, Scotland, England, even a couple from Australia. Skyler Fuhrman, a 19-year-old Santa Rosa Junior College student and Petaluma High graduate, has two blogs. One is an audio blog, also called a podcast because people download them to play on Apple's ubiquitous iPods.
He said that his podcast, "My dad's a huge supporter" of the podcast, he said.
Fuhrman's other blog is what's known as a group blog, They see it as a journal where they can rant and let off a little steam, as well as a scrapbook of thoughts and photos about their relationship. "It's public. Both of our parents read it," Furtado said. But she added that if they had a disagreement about something involving their parents, that probably wouldn't get posted. When she was away on vacation this summer, Furtado would sometimes use the blog as a way of communicating instead of calling or e-mailing. The couple has been writing the blog for about four months. Unfortunately, blogging also had many negative aspects as well. Many blogs are uninteresting, poorly written, misinformed or even vulgar. Parent Susan Edwards complained of some Petaluma students performing acts of online bullying on blog sites such as MySpace.com. She said that many parents don't know that their children are creating sites which use vulgar or even threatening language to describe their dislikes of other students. "I think their parents would be appalled," she said. "I think parents need to be aware of it." Kenilworth Junior High counselor Jennifer Lawler said the school is looking into how it can educate kids about not bullying other students online, whether it's by blog, e-mail or instant message.
(Corey Young and Megan Steffan contributed to this article. Contact Dane Golden at dgolden@arguscourier.com.) COMMUNITY BLOG CENTRAL
Petaluma native Eric Silverberg is creating a Petaluma-wide blogging network on PetalumaNet, "We want to try and combine this notion of blogs with a site to focus on the community," he said. The idea is to invite local businesses and member of the community to post blogs about the city in one central place, to create a local conversation. The Stanford graduate and former Microsoft engineer sees it as a "best of list" to bring together insight from businesses and community groups, creating a truly networked blogging community. "We're very possibly the first community to experiment with this kind of model," he said. "Investigative reporting is not the goal of PetalumaNet. It's more like a community bulletin board," he said. There are already message boards on Petaluma Online, but they are not actually blogs, which tend to be more personal in nature. Silverberg said that this would not necessarily be the lone place that blog postings should be made, but rather a centralized place. "Put your info here, and on your own Web site, and in your community newspaper," he said.
He suggested that the community blog clearinghouse could include community announcements, info on local organizations, fund-raisers, or books being read by students of a high school English class. Silverberg himself posts on both PetalumaNet and his personal blog, "Blogging is a way for people to show what's important to them. PetalumaNet is a way to create "best of" list and show what's important to them] and what's important to the community." "Anyone with something they feel passionately about is a great candidate to start blogging."
BLOGGING KATRINA
Former Petaluman Thom Butler, who recently relocated to New Orleans, has been blogging about his own particular perspective on the recovery efforts. See it at
Copyright © 2006 Petaluma Argus-Courier |
|
|
|
Site Sponsors
|
|
|
 |