Category: Olympia (Page 13 of 13)

The last week or so a small debate has been happening over email and blog in Oly (here, here and here) about the invitation last summer of some Canadian and American ships to Lakefair. Basically a cultural clash between different sides of Olympia, its been focussed on the ships.

I tried to write my homage to Lakefair this morning on Olyblog, but I ended up shutting down the comments because, well, I didn’t like where they were going, and I didn’t want to turn my post into a open thread on why Lakefair sucks and why the Navy sucks as well.

Anyway, I’ve been bummed about the specific controversy, I’ve also been bummed about how things like this usually get handled in Olympia, with the different groups talking past each other. Its true that we’re a very engaged community, but at the same time I wish we would be more engaged with each other and not so much choosing up sides.

Peter Levine has a very appropriate post that I’ll clip some text out of. Read the entire thing though, he’s good and worth the read:

…why are public discussions so polarized and dominated by hot-button issues? The questioner came from Kansas, and she specifically mentioned local discussions of education.

…

First of all, we have actual disagreements that split us into groups, and we sometimes have to deal with these issues. But they seem over-represented in our public life.

This is partly because most of us lack practical experience in mobilizing people except when issues are polarized. From countless news stories and movies, we know the “script” for angry, adversarial politics. We know how to organize our allies when we are angry at another group: we can call for a march or a rally, put up flyers, alert the media. There are also techniques for organizing people around less contentious issues–ways literally to get citizens out to meetings and then to achieve social change without relying on polarization. These techniques include the “one-on-one” interviews popular in community organizing; Study Circles and other deliberative forums; and volunteering opportunities that are connected to discussion and reflection. But such techniques are not widely reported or described in fiction; even less are they taught in schools.

During the heyday of May Day in Olympia (1999 to 2001) there was histories of May Days past published and distributed as part of the official pirate media campaign. This year, Olyblogger Sarah is putting together what she can find on Oly May Days past. She’s doing a really good job.

Commies, Queens, & Pretension [1919 – 1930s]
Liberation & Anarchy [1997, 1998]
Street Party & Phase II [2000]
Planting Seeds [2001]
“Buzzing Around” [2002]

Last night I was doing the vain act of seeing who had linked to my blog. I found this, which I first assumed was link spam, but no, it was an actual blog.

Its a blog by Dustin Luther who trains real estate agents how to write their own blogs and develop communities. I found the incoming link funny because it was a response to a real estate agent that was setting up his site, and he was frustrated because no one was blogging in Olympia. Dustin sets him straight, but it got me thinking about blogging and why real estate agents might want to use this medium.

Here’s a run down of his seminars that some what explains:

The first half of the presentation is understanding the competition.

In today’s online environment the traditional way of doing business for real estate agents is being attacked on many levels. Everyone from Google to Zillow to Redfin to ActiveRain wants a piece of the existing real estate pie… However, rather than say whether these changes are good or bad, I focus much more on understanding the motivations behind these types of companies through the prism of “Web2.0″.

The second part of the presentation is how to build up your personal brand.

The idea here is that once you understand how the competition is thinking, there are many ways you can use these same concepts to empower yourself to build up your own brand online. Of course, I spend a lot of time in this section about blogging, why it works and what are some advanced tools that you can use to blog smarter, but I also give tips on how to use other social networking tools to empower yourself!

At the end of the day, there are really two different presentations, but I hope you’ll find that they are very complementary.

Online (zillow, etc) is competition. Instead of running away from it, embrace it and create your own online brand. That is what I’m getting from his pitch.

Which is ok, but I wonder how relevant real estate blogs can be. Here are two blogs that Dustin points to, one in Seattle (only one post so far, but its new) and another in San Francisco.

To get an idea of what I usually think of this kind of stuff, read this blog at Olyblog.

You know, I was going to make fun of real estate agents trying to cop onto the next cool thing, but now that I think about it, I think Dustin has a point. The above two blogs (even the one with only one post) do seem to be honest attempts at blogging honestly, not trying to fake it.

I’m a big fan of politicians blogging, so on the surface, I shouldn’t be that hard on real estate agents. And there is something to be said for real estate being an inherently local business, so their contribution to local blogging communities could be a good one. Maybe that’s a point I should make to Dustin, make sure these folks reach out to other local bloggers, but in a human way, not in a used car salesman way.