Another Brilliant Idea I Don’t Know How to Impliment

I was thinking about the ongoing animosity between Nashville bloggers and our local free weekly, The Nashville Scene*. I was also thinking how I really like two things about the Nashville “blogosphere.” One is that we really do have a kind of loose-knit community and the other is that there’s a really amazing depth of knowledge in it.

The last time Tim Morgan guest-blogged at Nashville is Talking, he put together an RSS feed of all the Nashville bloggers Brittney knew of at that time, and I’ve been reading them all faithfully since then.

It’s pretty cool. I read a lot of folks I wouldn’t otherwise go to and I feel like my understanding of my community is a little broader because of it.

Here’s what I was wondering. Is there a way to bring the content of the Nashville blogosphere into direct competition with the Scene?

Could you design a site that kind of felt like a newspaper site–maybe it would have some individual pages–news, local, entertainment, sports, business, religion, opinion, etc.–that local bloggers could choose to participate in, that would split ad revenue among us? Not that it’d be a huge amount, obviously, but just some token? And could it run like some kind of giant modified site aggregator?

Okay, so here’s what I’m thinking, which I don’t know how to do. Say the person running the site came to me and said, “Hey, Aunt B., do you want to be a part of this?” and I said, “Yes, what do I do?”

I think, in a perfect world, I’d do nothing different than I already do, because it’s just a giant site aggregator, except that there would be some kind of standardized tagging so that the site would know how to classify your post.

Gah, I’m such a muddled thinker, but it seems to me that the pages would have standard slots and if you wanted your posts to show up in those slots, you’d tag them accordingly. So, if there was a slot for “idiot ideas,” I’d tag this “idiot ideas” and the first couple of paragraphs would show up on the site, there’d be a jump, and the jump would land you to my site.

If I had stuff I didn’t want to show up on the… what do we call it… the alt.everyday, I just wouldn’t give it a tag the software would recognize. So, I guess it’d be some kind of aggregator/sorting thingy.

And maybe on each page, there’d be ten slots that gave you part of the post of the author, but then there could be a bunch of links at the bottom of the page that were just post titles, so that as new posts were written, there’d be some movement on the page, with the newest post occupying the most prime real estate and then moving from slot to slot as more posts came in, so that you could guarantee folks that the newest… I don’t know… say twenty-five or thirty posts would stay available for at least a day, before dropping off.

And it seems to me that, if you had some kind of catchy thing to call it, you could work it a little like Citysearch. You could have a nashville.catchything.com, which would give you all Nashville & surrounding area bloggers. You could do a memphis.catchything.com, which would give you Memphis. But what I think would be really cool is that you could also do it by state–tennessee.catchything.com. Or maybe by region–south.catchything.com.

Now, this would be attractive to advertisers, I would think, because you could pinpoint the communities you wanted to reach. But I imagine it might also allow smaller blogs a platform from which to be heard nationally. Right now, if someone at CNN says, “Oh god, what are the bloggers saying about this?” They’re turning to Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan or Atrios or Kos or Michelle Malkin–people who already have a lot of readers and a platform from which to exude influence.

But if there were a widely known network of blogging aggregators/sorters/whatevers, any old assistant anywhere could say, “Wow, you know, I looked at tennesse.catchything.com and as far as national politics go, everyone is concerned that Nancy Pelosi is no better than her predecessors.” The site(s) would give them a place to go to get a quick overview of a wide swath of opinions.

Anyway, that’s what I was thinking about when I was walking the dog this morning. I wonder if a lack of caffeine is making me crazy.

*I guess we should just give up the pretense of calling it an alt.weekly?

Jan 3

“…and to the Republic for which it stands…”

Ah, friends and relatives, imagine a country in which we fought as hard for people to accept that we live in a republic as we do for them to accept that it’s "under God."

Anyway, today Massachusetts voted the second of three necessary times to ban gay marriages. They’d respect the ones that exist, but ban any new ones. At Pandagon, Pam Spaulding reports that even Democratic legislators were glad they voted on the issue. The fact that anyone could be glad that recognizing civil rights for various groups of people continues to be up for a vote shows that we need to fire a great many high school Civics teachers, as they have clearly failed to educated our students.

I mention this in passing only because today over to Brownfemipower’s blog, she’s passed along a story about some scientists who are working to develop some kind of hormone therapy to "cure" gay rams. There’s good discussion in the comments about whether the implication in the original story–that this might be foundational work to "cure" gay people or to even allow gayness to be eradicated in the womb–is from the researchers or just from hateful bigots or what.

And a couple of the commenters seem to be all, "Oh, no worries."

But how is it that gay people are not supposed to worry when the few rights they’ve been able to secure are being constantly threatened by folks who have no better reason than "Because it grosses me and God out."?

Yes, I suspect that the worry about "curing" gay sheep borders a touch on paranoia, but who’s to say how close the line between paranoia and reason in this case is?

Jan 3

Luck & Appreciation

Today was a much better day than Friday. And I felt really thankful, to you guys, who’ve done a lot to bolster me when I faltered last week, and to the folks I’ve been praying to and who have, I feel, tended my fortune even in my despair.

I was so grateful for that, for that feeling of not being left alone, that I wanted to give something back, to show my appreciation and my desire to pass along good fortune, not just take support. If that makes sense. Just some token of my esteem.

And so, on my way to lunch, I dropped a penny on the sidewalk, where some other person, who needs a little luck, can find it.

Jan 3

Luck & Appreciation

And so, on my way to lunch, I dropped a penny on the sidewalk, where some other person, who needs a little luck, can find it.

Jan 3

Luck & Appreciation

And so, on my way to lunch, I dropped a penny on the sidewalk, where some other person, who needs a little luck, can find it.

Jan 3

My Day–Let’s Look at the Numbers

Number of awesome people I had lunch with–2

Number of hot chocolates I treated myself to at Starbucks–1

Number of times I felt myself nodding off at my desk–0

Number of times I yawned*–3

Number of Diet Dr. Peppers I consumed today–0

Number of caffeinated beverages I consumed today–1

* I cannot remember the last time I yawned and when I did it today, I was surprised, like the return of an old unexpected friend, thus lending more credence to my theory that I’d been consuming so much caffeine that my default settings had become “awake” or “asleep” and I’d managed to completely do away with anything ranging from “mellow” to “yawn/stretch” to “vegging on the couch without taking a nap.”