Monday, June 18, 2007

Googling my way from Floyd to BigLick Backgrounding a new beat In the news business, that's what they might call it. For a start, I've been inviting Google to help me find out about my new city before I move there, and maybe even find a new friend or two with interesting local blogs. The official sites for the university, the city (etc.) and three neighboring counties were easy to find. Real estate sites were as easy... but not always helpful. Online-marketing outfits appear to have set up a lot of tacky chain stores disguised as local Mom & Pop operations... and I hadn't noticed how many commercial sites are working the word "blog" into their identification, making it a little harder to find authentic individual voices. (Searching for a new house, condo or apartment, I finally called a Realtor recommended by a couple of my new friends, and he pointed me to the place I took... but the runner-up house was advertised on one of the nearby Craigslist sites. The renter was a real estate agent, although the ad didn't mention the name of a firm, just a first-person contact... Deceiving? I guess they do that in the newspaper classifieds too. But online, it's not as if they're paying by the word.) Today I've been looking more specifically for local bloggers, hoping to find a few neighborly voices... inspired by RNeal and friends here in Knoxville, and by my old Massachusetts neighbor Lisa Williams, her "http://placeblogger.com" site, and the $200,000 grant she just snagged to experiment with adding geographic tags to blogs. Searching for Southwest Virginia blogs, I tried placeblogger itself, but ran into some confusion caused by an aggregator site that collects short bits from Virginia blogs, mostly about politics, but doesn't make it clear where they are coming from, and made me waste mouse-clicks to find the original authors' sites. Maybe I was just tired... Google's advanced searching tools helped... I added some quote marks and minus signs to eliminate that aggregator and other off-topic sites to whittle down the list. The "minuses" might cost me some sites I'd like to visit, but for now I'm willing to sacrifice them. For example: Google: "southwest virginia" virginia "new river" -"real estate blog" blog -"west virginia" etc. No offense meant to the beautiful state of West Virginia, but even John Denver put western Virginia's Shenandoah Valley in the wrong state, as a friend pointed out to me recently. (Or maybe John's lyric just mentioned the valley while passing through it, then turned farther west?) In addition to Google, I searched with Technorati and Del.ico.us and came up with a few more possibilities. I did cross state lines, stumbling on a North Carolina site's introduction to one of my new neighbors, and bookmarking a more regional group blog titled Hillbilly Savants, "about our Appalachia - the real one, not the Hollywood-stereotype nor the third-world nation-esque stereotype being sold by do-gooders, or even the neo-Romantic sylvan stereotype that Rousseau would probably buy into.." You don't see "Hollywood" and "neo-Romantic sylvan..." in the same sentence very often... Misleadingly named, the "Radford Virginia Local Blog" has no blogger content; it's just an aggregator for regional newspaper headlines and canned ads, including an ad looking for someone to direct the site -- apparently a local franchise of a your-town's-name-here operation. On my dial-up connection, the layout was bandwidth-greedy and annoying. Topix.net/city/radford-va is a less aggravating version of the same kind of aggregating. Its clean design may be the result of generally deeper pockets, as a combined effort of three of the largest news organizations in America -- Gannett, McClatchy and Tribune -- each owning a collection of newspapers, television stations and other properties. As I get settled, I'll get around to looking up the Virginia papers and TV stations in Columbia's "Who Owns What" list. David St.Lawrence's Ripples from Floyd, Va., looks like just the kind of blog I was after, complete with hyperlocal sensibilities. I'd already found the Floyd Country Store music sessions online and bookmarked some musicians' sites, but still haven't been there in person. Soon, though. Southwest Distress is subtitled "Musings, rantings, bad jokes, and random political commentary from the New River Valley and beyond," lest anyone in Phoenix thinks it's about them. The right rail of the page has two sections labelled "Lefty Blogroll" and "Righty Blogroll." The site averages about a post a month, which will help with my information-gluttony problem. iCanoeTheNew is an exended advertisement for an outfit that leads fishing trips, with a "blog" page that could be labelled "customer testimonials." Along with the concept of paying $325 a day to go fishing for "trophy" fish, I'm intrigued by statements on this page and elsewhere that "the New" is actually "the second-oldest river in the world." So far I haven't gone looking for the answer to the reporter's most important question "How do you know that?" But I will point news writing students to the generous time estimate that the river is "estimated to be between 10 and 360 million years old." Even assuming they mean "between 10 million and 360 million," that's a pretty healthy margin of error. Eventually, I did find the kind of "local knowledge" site I was looking for http://swvanews.com/blogs, "a blog aggregator for Southwest Virginia blogs," more modest than the still-on-hiatus rockytopbrigade.org, which did some nifty sorting and aggregating. (I've heard rumors a revival is in the works, but not happening as fast as I expected.) Back in the New River Valley, I'm going to declare my own Web-surfing hiatus until I make more progress on the planning and packing... before I get distracted by the Virginia offerings of Blogflux, Blog Carnival, regional publications, the Blacksburg Electronic Village community, professional journalists' blogs like these, or even these local bloggers profiled in the Roanoke Times. That reminds me that even though I met the vivacious Dean Amy on my last visit, I haven't even been back to BigLickU this week... and I still have to see if any of my cell phone photos of her talk at RU came out well enough to blog. I'm glad that she cleared up the game of the name, though, by mentioning that Roanoke was once called "Big Lick." (OK, so I'm new in town.) Will all that licker-ish wordplay (and a new sex column) attract students? Amy said she's already had some anxious comments from an established student media organization or two, but she doesn't see BLU as competing with them. Personally, I hesitate to click on a "lick this" link to indicate I like a story... a cross between "Digg this" and del.ico.us... I'll be watching to see how many younger folks get on the "Virginia is for Lickers" bandwagon. 2:59:02 AM    comment []

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