Tag: blogosphere

Here are links to a few more local area blogs that I've rounded up:

Franktown Cafe
Backyard Traveler
Wild Washoe
Gem's musings

There's another new blog in the Reno area, Reno Wire by Jim Scripps. It just got started this month, so there's not a lot of content yet, but we'll have to keep an eye on it.

It's amazing how much the Reno blogosphere has exploded in the last couple of years. When I started this site in 2005, I had to really scrape and scramble to put together a list of "Northern Nevada Bloggers". I had been doing it at my (now all-but-dead) personal site for several years, and I knew of a couple others in the area, but really the list was very slim when I first started it. But one day something clicked, and it seemed like every week, every day, there were new blogs sprouting up, mostly in Reno. Now, it's all going so fast that there's no way I could ever hope to keep up. So my list should be looked at as just a slice of what's really out there. NevadaBlogs is doing a better job, but even that isn't complete. It can't be complete, not with the explosion that's been going on in the "Sierra-o-sphere" (coined by Yukon Sully, back when his blog was still alive).

So, I actually think it's great. It's great when there are so many blogs that nobody can keep track of them or read them all. That's the way things should be. At least it's that way in Reno; we've got to work on Carson City next.

Following links from Our Tahoe, I discovered a couple of new area blogs today:

Tahoe Girl

Tahoe Homes Blog

Firefighter Blog - not a local blog, but has a lot of coverage of the Angora Fire.

Also, I discovered a link to the Tahoe Transitions project, a rephotography project like my Then and Now articles. This one compares three views of a scene from Lake Tahoe: a historic picture from the archives, a rephotograph from last fall, and a rephotograph from the 1990s, taken from the book Stopping Time by Peter Goin. Our Tahoe has all the photo locations marked on a Google Map, so you can easily find a particular viewpoint. Or the official site is hosted at UNR.

The site's builders curiously decided to show the three photos morphing into each other using a QuickTime movie, so it's not the easiest site to navigate. And it crashes my browser. But it's still cool to see another Then and Now project out there, even if I do get jealous and territorial every time I run across one.

Erin Granat, UNR journalism grad and former Miss Nevada runner-up, is starting a video blog for VisitRenoTahoe.com, In this pilot episode, she goes to the Reno Rodeo to check out cute cowboys.

Putting your videos on YouTube is the smart way to go. Good to see somebody's paying attention.

Ryan Jerz in the comments the other day slipped in a plug for his new Lake Tahoe placeblog, OurTahoe.org. I'd heard he was working on this project, but I never had a URL for it until now.

Right now the coverage is all about the Angora Fire, of course, and they seem to be aggregating a lot of opinions, blog posts, and Flickr photos about the fire.

The site is a product of the Interactive Environmental Journalism M.A. Program at UNR. In the past I've been critical of university-based projects like this, that seem to be done more for a grade than for the community. Most of my skepticism came from seeing the GoSkokie project go awry a couple of years ago. Go Skokie was a community site, a placeblog if you will, that was built by university students as part of a class project for a community outside of Chicago. After the class was over, the students got their grades and moved on, leaving the site barren and abandoned. It seems they had never drummed up interest among community members to keep the site going, so without the support of the students it died a painful death.

But things have gotten better since then. GoSkokie was reborn as SkokieTalk, a community-led effort that was built on the work the university students did. And other university/community collaborations became very successful, like Hartsville Today. So I'm open to the idea of OurTahoe, as long as there's good community involvement and it's not just the students carrying the whole site on their shoulders. I mean, I carry Around Carson entirely on my shoulders, but that's because I'm part of the community I'm covering. And also because I'm nuts.

So OurTahoe looks like a site to watch.

There's another new local blog I came across, The Good, The Bad, The Spin by Bob Conrad. It doesn't cover local topics; he talks about the state of public relations in the internet age. Bob is also responsible for the Nevada Department of Conservation and Natural Resources' blog, which I mentioned here a few weeks ago.

There's another new blog on the scene, RENOvation at renogrowth.blogspot.com. In this day where so many of the Reno blogs seem to be focused on downtown, RENOvation is turning his cameras outward and exploring the growth and construction going on in the rest of the Truckee Meadows. New hotels, new restaurants, new housing developments and coffee shops. There's also a companion photo gallery, although it's not at Flickr, it's at Photobucket.

I first heard about this site two weeks ago at Downtown Makeover, and it's really taken off. I'm looking forward to following it, especially now that I never make it into Reno anymore.

I came across another local blog, that of Tasha Costa at techtasha.wordpress.com. Tasha writes an occasional column in the Nevada Appeal on technology issues, and her blog is mostly a place for her to link to the articles when they go up. But she's only the second Nevada Appeal employee I know of with a real blog (after Kirk Caraway), so props to her. May there be many more.

Around Carson got a mention in the Carson Times this weekend, along with a couple of other sites from our long-neglected blogroll there on the right.

I'm also called "one of the finest bloggers in the Carson City/Carson Valley region," but I'm sure that's only through lack of competition. I'm sure there are countless people out there who aren't blogging, but who could blow me out of the water without even trying. My job is to try to find them, and get them motivated.

So here's your motivation. If you want to beat me out at being the finest blogger in Carson City, just click on that blue publish button there on the left. It won't be that tough.

Placeblogger has finally launched. A few months late, but I know what that can be like. It's a directory of sites like this one, that cover a certain town or community. And Around Carson is actually listed on there, although it's not part of the list of top ten placeblogs. I can't understand why, especially considering that their list of recent entries includes all the Viagra spam that's been making it to the homepage the last couple of days. And the fact that I pretty much took the last two weeks off for the holidays, even though I really didn't plan for it to happen that way.

In all they have 8 placeblogs listed for Nevada, including Reno and its Discontents, Nevada Politics, an aggregator run by the Nevada Appeal, and Nevada Blogs, an aggregator run by Dane Carlson.

Lisa Williams’ description of what placeblogging is really makes me want to get motivated and make Around Carson better:

Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They’re about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn’t news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.