As my memory serves, and I have no reason to doubt my memory, but our Blog Father Rick brought us Olyblog because he was inspired by this particular episode about Hyperlocal Journalism from Radio Open Source.

The original version of RoS, by the way, was probably one of the most awesome media things I’ve ever come across. I wasn’t a Christopher Lydon fanboy previously, so I’m not a huge fan of the current iteration (it isn’t even on my podcast list). But, how RoS flowed in those days (literally a blog with a radio show) was awesome.

Anyway, as I remember, this show inspired Rick to set up Olyblog just a few weeks after it aired.

Its interesting to look at the examples cited in that episode to see how they’re doing.

One site, H2Otown is gone. Its founder, Lisa Williams, is still very much involved in journalism, working at the Institute for Nonprofit News. But, H2Otown disapeared while ago. Here’s an article on its hiatus in 2008 (which predated its actual death later).

One interesting comment from the hiatus post was this one:

Steve Owens wrote, “What’s amazing to me is that you go away for a year and nothing sprouts up in your place! Goes to show how [irreplaceable] this site is.”

Maybe something should have sprouted up after the founder left. Maybe it wasn’t the site that was irreplaceable, but really she was irreplaceable. Maybe that’s a lesson for us.
Anyway, the other site featured, Baristanet in New Jersey is still very much alive. And, I mean, really alive. At some point, the blog became an LLC and populated with a series of writers. In this sense, it became like our very familiar hyperlocal examples like West Seattle blog or Capitol Hill.
I suppose the lessons here are that Olyblog needed to move to something more official. Either a non-profit of some sort of business. Depending on the one main guy (Rick) and the rest of us unofficial guys led to the decline over there. 
But, that’s for another post.