Category: olyblog (Page 1 of 2)

I can tell you how exactly I came across Olyblog, and I also can tell you I at least marked it with a post at this very blog. I apparently came across Olyblog on the old tescrier (Evergreen State College) email list that at one point had been public.

And, here is my very first post over at Olyblog, which for some reason disappeared from the Olyblog itself. It was about a dumb topic, so I’m not sure I miss it being there.

Perusing my early posts, I seemed to focus a lot on civic affairs, politics, community wireless, that kind of thing. Mostly the same stuff I write about here. But, I did talk more specifically about certain candidates and people, something I try to stay away from nowadays.

But, eventually (about after six months of Olyblog) I started doing a weekly “What’s on the council” rundown. This was a pretty fun exercise. I got into the habit of waiting for the city webmaster to upload the council’s packet for the week, and quickly read through it. This reminded me a lot of what being a reporter was like.

It wasn’t enough for me to just beat the Olympian reporter doing the same thing, but I usually tried to find some nuance or angle I assumed the Olympian wouldn’t cover.

Like anything at Olyblog, I eventually quit writing the updates. Thad Curtz kept up on it for awhile, but seems to have lost energy for it as well.

Which is sad. But, that didn’t make me as sad as the idea never really spreading. I hoped that people would pick up other local governments (port, Tumwater, county) and do similar rundowns. But, that never picked up.

It didn’t take much skill, just poking through the staff reports and summarizing what was going on.

I can understand why people never did though, it was also pretty tedious doing it week after week. I even now serve on the regional library board and I’ve tried to keep up with doing just monthly updates. I quit that eventually too.

Ah, well. Blogging is hard, amiright?

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.”

This graph shows the posts by month created at Olyblog between August 2005 and June 2015.

Right now we’re just about two months shy of the 10th anniversary of Rick McKinnon flipping the switch on Olyblog. This particular website for about four years was the hub of everything Olympia for me. It was also pretty important to a handful of very nice people that I don’t think I would have met without Olyblog ever existing.

I want to spend some time blogging about that sweet old home of the Olyblogosphere. I sometimes stop by the old farmstead to see what’s going on. But, I haven’t posted there myself in quite some time. It feels like an old empty house. Or, and old school.

What I’d really like to do is get together with some of the folks from the high water mark of Olyblog and start to deconstruct the awesome experience that Olyblog represented. Anyone out there interested in that?

Olyblog was pretty interesting case study of a local online community. Rick really had a great idea when he launched Olyblog. Olympia wasn’t that much different, but the internet sure was. And, if we’d done things differently maybe Olyblog would be healthier now, despite the changes. But, that’s a post for a later week.

In the meantime, here are some links to wet your beak:

Here is the first post on Olyblog, of course it is about downtown.

Here are my posts about Olyblog here at Olympia Time. I spent a good chunk of my time writing at Olyblog, but I still found time to blog about Olyblog at Olympia Time.

Here is the old Olyblog docents email list. This list and the docent drama in early 2008 will play into what I’m going to write about later. But, I’ll give you a chance to poke your head in first.

From Jay Stewart, who knows a thing or two about the back-end of Olyblog (since his business hosts the online community gratis):

All,

DNS server failure forced a reload of software. Backup DNS zone file was out of date with old address. I thought I changed it back, but have apparently used the wrong server address, as it seems to be pointed to Nat’s development server.

I will fix this as soon as possible and apologize for problem, this is one of the “loose ends” to re-tie after a system recover as extensive as the one I did this weekend; my bad.

Jay

Thanks Jay!

Rick:

After more than a year of working with a group of docents who have helped to run the blog, I’ve decided to end the experiment. The docent model was not entirely successful, in no small part due to an overall lack of organization and commitment, but lately due to some specific personality conflicts. I’m not sure what will take its place, but I’m hopeful that we can develop some sort of community-governed system. Stay tuned.

Jason, a fellow former docent who I like and respect, called for Rick’s resignation via email to the rest of the docents earlier today. Just for reference, Rick founded and still owns Olyblog.

This dustup reflects a view of Olyblog that in my opinion isn’t entirely healthy or productive. “Olympia owns Olyblog” is hurtful because Olyblog cannot be everything to everyone. We’ve become too used to their being one place, one newspaper, one blog where we all go.

More Olyblogs.

UPDATE: Though Rick turned off comments on his thread, a post with comment enabled have popped up:
A place to comment on the “End of the Experiment.”