I For One Welcome Our New Metroblogging Overlords
By Richard Eriksson on November 22, 2005 - 2:44pm
When Beyond Robson launched, I wondered whether there would be a Vancouver edition of the Metroblogging city-based weblogs. Late last month, through the Vancouver Technorati tag, I found that Jeffery Simpson that such a site was forthcoming. Through The Vancouverite, I find out that the site has been launched, and that there is some kind of "blog war" happening. That last part is news to me, because blogging is not a battle nor is it a war, but rather it's a conversation. I'm on the side of Travis, who says that calling it a war or battle is taking blogging a little too seriously. After the break are some initial impressions of Metroblogging Vancouver, and how they can imrpove.
So far the writing's really good. I'm a little biased in that I've met and collaborated with Travis of Hop Studios and like the guy, so by default I like what he has to say, but the others writing on the site have some good contributions so far. I've subscribed to their RSS feed and have read everything so far. On a technical level, they do a good job of adverting their feeds (for those of us who don't read weblogs in browsers anymore), and linking directly to the author's site below their articles is a really great way to personalize and make feel informal their contributions. They have some pretty ostentatious ads on the sidebar, but that's the point, I guess. One woman out of 5 is better than zero women out of 5.
Some areas of improvement (which may not be feasible because of the nature of the community's setup): categories to which writers can add posts to and RSS feeds for each category. The pop-ups for writer bios is a little strange (that they're pop-ups, not the content) and different than the look of the site.
In general, it's not a community site, otherwise I would have been able to sign up for an account and write directly on their site. It's not competition for Urban Vancouver, and I don't really consider any of the group weblogs to be competition for each other. They may consider each other competitors, but as I stated earlier, this whole blogging thing a conversation where we link directly to each other and help promote each other and grow the community. I tried applying to their public Metroblogging Vancouver Flickr Group, one place they might have had a community grow, but was denied with no explanation. It's fine, actually, it wasn't secretly an invite-only group, but having something public-facing goes against the trend (i.e. Web 2.0) where the lines between consuming and producing will soon no longer exist. (Time passes, and Sean Bonner of Metroblogging explains the Flickr group.) I for one welcome our new Metroblogging overlords, however, and will continue to read weblogs where the subject matter is the city in which I live. Right now, and for the foreseeable future, that city is Vancouver.
but it is is war in that only one site can come up FIRST when you type 'vancouver blog' into google.
kk+
Thanks Richard.
As a trusted blog personality, you can be helpful in rounding up others to toil in our underground server caves.
Kris, you seem to have blogs confused with "Highlander" (shot in Vancouver, woo!). There can be more than one. :)
Thanks for the warm welcome to Vancouver. Just to make an "official" statement, if one needs making, I hardly think there's a blog war nor should their be. The Vancouverite posted about the site before it had officially launched, which is fine as our URLs aren't that hard to guess, but we were worries about setting the site up at that point, not who might be threatened by it.
Also, no offense intended with the flickr thing, and perhaps you've pointed out something we should explain further, but those flicker groups are where the hearders are created from. Every night a script randomly pulls images from that group and builds a new header for the site. Since there's no credit on the images and no way to get random people's approval to do this we felt the best thing to do was keep this restricted to people who are contributors to the site itself. It actually IS a private invite only group, but we thought it would be cool to leave it visable for people to see the archives if they wanted. Maybe we need to either hide the groups, or make the reason they are closed more clear.
Anyway, thanks again and I'm also looking forward to seeing where the blog goes.
Thanks for the clarification, Sean. I can think of other ways to do the 'authenticated' (that is, making sure it's Vancouver Metrobloggers only) Flickr photos, but the way you describe it seems like the easiest, if at least initiailly confusing in terms of rationale.
There's obviously 'room' for Vancouver Metroblogging among the group weblog about Vancouver. In fact, the more people writing about this city--the good parts and the bad parts--the better. None of the sites mentioned are community sites (we even have friends who think Urban Vancouver could be a little more inviting, and we're looking forward to them writing about that), though they will have a community of readers, who will no doubt link to the sites and comment, publicly and privately. So in that respect, I too look forward to what Metroblogging has to offer Vancouverites and its readers around the world.
"therwise I would have been able to sign up for an account and write directly on their site."
Actually, you can sign up for an account. Go to metroblogging.com/apply.phtml and you can sign up. Typically the only people who aren't approved are spambots, trolls, and 8 year olds. The sites aren't message boards, they are a collection of writers. In fact there's a post about just that on the site already:
http://vancouver.metblogs.com/2005/11/apply_baby_apply.phtml
One thing you'll see as we move forward I think is more pictures. Right now only one post by Travis has any photos. Once we have more photos it'll be more compelling to the average reader. I quite like how the Seattle site looks (seattle.metblogs.com) and I think as we develop we'll get to that level.
As for the ratio of women to men, that's always a concern. Back in my student newspapers days every time I went to a conference of the Canadian University Press there'd be at least one workshop worth of debate on how to better make our news rooms better balanced. Some papers, like the Martlet at UVic, were really good at achieving a balance whereas others weren't.
Since it's open to anyone to join the site I do hope that more females join. We always want more authors and the more diverse the authors are the better the blog will be. One of the great things about Vancouver is the diversity and so with any luck the site will soon reflect that.