History, politics, people of Oly WA

Author: Emmett O'Connell (Page 83 of 176)

New local blog list at the Olympia wiki

Started a list of blogs at the Olympia wiki. This is essentially my effort to chart the olympiablogosphere and to remind people that the wiki even exists.

So, if you have a blog, list it there please.

Got started this morning and was basically able to outline two big categories: community blogs and individual blogs. I think this is an important distinction because the first group the places I would suggest people to go if they wanted to participate directly in a community, the second, for one on one conversation with a blogger.

I was only able to list two blogs in the individual blog list before I got called away, so since this is a wiki, feel free to add to it.

Please, answer me this newspaper/media question

I read a lot about newspapers and the business of newspapers, but I hardly blog about it. Son of Ronald Roland reminded me that I had a thought to ask of people that read this particular blog.

Ok, recently we’ve seen an exodus of the “adult in the room” of the Washington press corp:

Dave Ammons and John Hughes to the Secretary of State’s office.

Robert Mak for City of Seattle.

David Seago for retirement.

David Postman to Vulcan.

Ralph Thomas to Katz Communications Group.

Given that Ives Galarcep, a ten year veteran reporter from a mid-sized east coast newspaper, can make the successful transition from his print job to a self-sustaining niche blog.

Also, given that Crosscut has a place in Seattle media world.

Ok, so here’s the question to answer:

Do you think after Postman, Ammons, Hughes, Thomas and Seago left their print jobs, and instead of going into the government and PR worlds, they started a group blog, that it would work out for them?

My answer in the comments.

Mariners win, magic number to 7 (March to not being embarrassed)

I thought Carlos Silva was supposed to start today, and I’m sure to learn why that didn’t happen if it was supposed to happen. But, I didn’t actually watch the game (my son’s baptism was today), but I checked the score.

Sweet, we won the series against the Yankees. Awesome.

Well, today’s story shouldn’t be about Silva, but about the Yankees, but yesterday I promised a Silva thought, so here goes.

Last year I had a thing for Jorge Campillo. The thought of a Mexican junkballer just appealed to me. But, we let him go and he ended up with the Braves and now sports a 7-7 record and sub-4 ERA.

Instead of keeping him for the cheap, we signed Carlos Silva (4-14, plus 6 ERA). This was my symbol of the team in trouble, we signed a guy seemingly just so we can spend more money on him. Eh.

Oly2012 not netroots, for now

You’re doing it wrong (from their email tonight):

Oly2012 is a net-roots organization dedicated to helping decision-makers significantly improve downtown Olympia before 2012 by mobilizing an active network of well-informed citizens.

Things I know about Oly2012 so far:

1. They don’t have a blog, a online bulletin board, or any sort of online exchange (private or public).

2. One of their founding members Pete Stroble does post at Everyday Olympia and Olyforums, but I think that’s a far cry from actually being a netroots organization.

I don’t have a quick definition right now, but being netroots is more than having an email newsletter and posting stuff to your site every once in awhile. They could add a blog, but its more about an online democratic decision making process than simply discussion.

Being at Everyday Olympia and Olyforums is a good start, but its not enough to call the organization netroots.

I need to think about this some more and email Pete. Or something.

Morrow wins, magic number at 8 [March to not being embarrassed]

Morrow wins.

And, if I’m doing this correctly (trying to find out the minimum number of wins the Mariners need to avoid 100 losses) the Mariners magic number is at 8.

Since we had a win from a youngster tonight, I’m reminded of another young Mariner pitcher: Bob Wolcott, who was famously thrown to the wolves against the Indians in 1995, but came out a winner. He ended up a big fizzle.

My story goes that when I was at Delaware State studying journalism, in one of the classes we had to write a fake half hour news script to tape. My sports section referred to Wolcott winning the Cy Young while pitching the Mariners into the World Series.

Hopefully Morrow ends up like my fantasy Wolcott, not the real Wolcott.

OH NOES, he’s steeling our content!

OH NO! I HAVE LET GO!
more animals

Yeah, really he’s not.

Olympia Online RSS is a sweet idea.

A bit… uh… janky, but it does the job ok. Its basically a feed aggregator for a handful of blogs in Olympia, a lot like feedtacoma.com, but that website is less on the janky side.

The arrival of Olympia Online RSS is hilarious because of Jason (enpen)’s reaction to a similar effort by Rick over at Olyblog. Read here.

S6 over at Olyforum does a really good job at not really getting it here as well.

The whole thing drives off the RSS course very quickly into Rick and Jason’s personal issues with each other, but Jason’s initial point of “using my rss feed on your site is wrong” is very wrong on its own.

It is not stealing content. There are spam blogs out there that blatantly copy content from rss feeds, but neither what Rick is doing at Olyblog nor Olympia Online RSS are doing that. They’re linking. Automatically linking, but linking in any form is good.

From cluetrain:

Thesis 7: Hyperlinks Subvert Hierarchy

The ability of the internet to link to additional information – information which might exist beyond the formal hierarchy of organizational structure or published material from such an organization – acts as a means of subverting, or bypassing, formal hierarchies.

March to not being embarrassed (the explainer)

So as of right now, the Mariners have 23 games left and 15 possible losses before they reach 100 for the season. Which, would be embarrassing.

What is more embarrassing is that from the middle of July until right now I’ve hardly paid attention to the Mariners, which if you’ve met me before this year, is weird.

I used to be the type of person that would come home and turn on the t.v. or radio just to have the Mariners in the background. Before this year, my family and I used to attend at least half a dozen (at the very very least) games a year. This year I went to one, and only because the ticket was free and I was invited.

When I lived in Delaware in the 90s, I would stay up late watching Headline News, waiting for the Mariner’s score. When I moved back to Olympia, I felt immediately blessed that the Mariners were not only on t.v. a lot, but on the radio.

It was a variety of reasons that put me over the edge. Two kids are much harder than one. The Mariners are historically and embarrassingly bad. I want to quit blogging bad. Soccer is also suddenly fun to watch. etc…

I’m here to make amends. So, this I promise: From now until the end of the year, I’m not only going to watch the Mariners as much as I used to, I’m going to blog every game.

For every loss, you’ll get the death march countdown to 100 losses. For every win, you’ll get a memory from Emmett’s Mariners memory bank. For example today, it was the one about staying up late watching cable when I was 17 on the east coast, waiting for the yellow lettering telling me the Mariners were done.

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