My Favorite Local Blog

My favorite blog for my current town, Northampton, is Tommy Devine's Online Journal.

It's my old standby, though I admit I don't spend a lot of time seeking out other newer ones. I was also a fan of The Northamptonist, but he has since moved to New York City and that blog is more or less now deceased.

What I love about this blog is that it is both personal and political. There is always something fun in every post, he uses a mix of videos and pictures. He uses both found videos and his own original videos.

I don't like blogs that talk too much about families and kids... and where Tommy doesn't have kids, that rarely comes up. The content is more about interesting or controversial things happening in the community.

He has a great eye for noticing things around me that I never do. I often go to his site to find ideas for longer stories for classes or the Collegian.

The blog is especially interesting lately as Tommy has moved about a few times between Northampton and Amherst, and in his daily travels he passes through both towns. This is similar to how I live my life commuting to school in Amherst from Northampton so all of his content is of great interest to me.

Most recently I liked his entry where he mentions how a local bookstore is going out of business. I didn't know till I read his blog.

The internet has made it difficult to impossible to run an old fashioned bookstore at a profit. The same thing is happening to record stores. What book or record store, however large their selection, can match the size and price of the internet? In the case of the Jeffery Amherst however, it also didn't help that the owner is 79 years old. He offered the business for sale at a low price, but no one wanted to climb aboard a sinking ship.

He links out a lot and the posts are always fun to read.

I also love that he makes his identity known and as a result I have met him in person. I see him around quite often and it's pretty great that I actually know the person who's local blog I like the most.

Blog Comparrison

iBrattleboro and Baristanet both seemed much more like a citizen journalism blog. While Loudounextra appeared much more professional. They had more interactive videos and overall seemed to be higher in quality.

Loudonextra.com reminded me of Masslive's setup.

iBrattleboro has a lot of event promoting on it. Both Baristanet and iBrattleboro have a lot of links on the side with great resources for the community.

Baristanet has an ad from a local tavern for election night festivities. They have other smaller ads from local businesses throughout the homepage.

Loudounextra is by far the most professional and most well funded of the three.

Getting Comments

Blogging sure is tricky.

Getting comments is even trickier.

I can blog and blog till I'm blue in the face (keyboard?) and be totally happy with it, think it's interesting. But still, no one will comment. I suppose this is why I should just post a lot without thinking too much about it.

For my post I sort of over thought it. I was dead set on trying my darndest to get the comments in a natural way. I thought: what are people talking about? what might get them all riled up?

First thought was Sarah Palin. I thought, "BRILLIANT".

Not so much.

Still the comments didn't really come to me. I hadn't thought out that my Sarah Palin hate post would likely get lost in the shuffle of many others just like it.

So I resorted to advertising my blog on facebook and twitter.

I had one friend, Jeff, challenge my thoughts on Palin, though only on FB, he kept promising to comment but never did. I'm still waiting for the day he defends her... because I really am interested. Also it would be amazing because this guy is the king of procrastinating writing to me. Worst Las Vegas pen pal EVER.


On the other hand a few good friends of mine put their two cents in for me like Kelsey, Teresa and Mike. A few class mates chimed in too. I responded to the posts as much as I could. I still have a hope it could be commented on even more.

Scott Brodeur brought up in class that the subject of Sarah Palin will just be sort of dated. Thus hard to get any comments after a while. Also - politics is often something that people are reluctant to discuss or feel intimidated to respond to.

I certainly feel for that.

I was a bit surprised that my post didn't draw more comments. I thought people would vehemently agree or disagree with me and start some all out posting war. No such luck.

I think that in the future I will try to do more posts where I put something out there, and don't say much about it myself. Then ask the readers to make their own assumptions in responses. That seems to work pretty well. The more open the post is, the more people respond it seems.

I wish that I had went with something funny and random like Katelyn did. She got 24 comments! So jealous!

Features

Today the article I told you that I was writing before ran in the Daily Collegian. I wrote a profile piece of the father of western Massachusetts blogging, Tom Devine.

Here's the intro to my story:

You've probably seen him hanging around the Haigis Mall; a man about the age of your father, in his daily uniform: a worn baseball cap, a ratty T-shirt, some classic blue jeans and usually some well-loved Converse Chuck Taylors. Thomas "Tommy" Devine was a student the University of Massachusetts in the late 1970s, during its party hey day. Now, Devine is known as the "father" of the western Massachusetts blogosphere. He never did finish his degree at UMass, but still went on to become influential in the Pioneer Valley.

I hope you'll read the story, I linked it above. Devine's life is a very interesting one.

It's funny because I just bumped into him at the W.E.B. Du Bois library, while he's making his daily blog post himself.

I have a couple other articles in the works now, one potential one that will run in the Arts and Living section about my trip to NYC next week to see SNL. I'll chronicle my time there, touring the NBC studio, how I got the tix etc.

The other story will be a feature for my section about the Flywheel in Easthampton. The music venue was a staple to the local scene for years. They moved out of their old location and have yet to finish remodeling the old town hall in Easthampton to re-open in.

Running my own section of the paper this year has been interesting. I hope if anyone in class wants to write features stories that they'll contact me! I need stories guys!

This blog was getting really politically heavy... so I hope today and yesterday lightened it up a bit.

here's another SNL skit for chuckles.

Hack - NYC Taxis

Over the summer I interned at Boston's Weekly Dig. Even though I didn't get paid, I got to attend some free events, got free beer, free redbulls, free books, free CDs and free DVDs. In fact I still haven't gotten to read or watch everything.

One book really stuck out for me though. I read Melissa Plaut's "Hack: How I Stopped Worrying About What to Do With My Life and Started Driving a Yellow Cab."

What I thought was interesting about it off the bat, and I know the class will too, is that the book came to be after her blog, "New York Hack", received over 1 million unique user hits and she was subsequently offered a book deal. The blog served as her record of driving cab, dedicated solely to that.

The book was a real page turner to me. You can read my review of it here.

So keep blogging everyone! There is hope to make money from it yet! It really makes me want to start a specialized blog. One that someone will give me a book deal for doing.

Here is an interview with Plaut about how she got into driving taxis and the experience. Like many of us, in or out of college, she didn't know what she wanted to do with her life.

Linking

The section I found most interesting in chapter 8 was on page 158 entitled "Permission to Link."

I had never once considered that it would be illegal to link to another site. For pictures, yes, I had considered that. But I also considered that my blog is probably not important enough to even get their attention.

For links though, my thought was that I was in fact always doing the linked site a favor. I'm getting my readers to check out their site, further legitimizing their information, and I'm even bumping them up on the Google search pages. Where is the problem? They are obviously getting credit because the link distinguishes my website from theirs.

Now I'm afraid to link in this entry. But this entry is a lot more boring than others, right? Sorry, but I need to cover my ass.

(Chapter 8 Foust)

Stuff White People Like

Stuff White People Like is a satirical blog about... stuff... that white people like. Really. You will be amazed at how spot on the posts are.

What inspired me to share this with you is the weather. It hasn't been cold enough for a coat and scarf yet but numerous girls I see around UMass insist on wearing big boho esque scarves around their necks. One of my favorite Stuff White People Like posts talks about the silly matter.

What is also amazing is that the blog became so popular that the author was offered a book deal. I want the book so bad, it offers other write ups that will never be online. The blog only began in January 2008 and the book came out this summer.

Here's a video of the blog's author Christian Lander reading the blog entry about unpaid internships.

Tommy Devine

Well today I had a long day.

I met with Tommy Devine, The Baystate Objectivist, the author of the first western Mass blog. I met up with him at Haymarket cafe in Northampton where I took that picture of him. I am starting to write a story about him as a feature article for the Daily Collegian.

I have always found his blog fascinating. Tommy has probably the most honest blog I've ever seen. He's not afraid to put himself out there. He's a former UMass student, journalism major and Daily Collegian writer. He posts entries about his sex life, politics, and even his former drug addictions. He isn't ashamed about any of it either.

It doesn't hurt that Tommy is always very easy to talk to and supportive of my blogging.

Tom covers a lot about UMass, Northampton, Amherst and Springfield in his blog. Though at first the Springfield native focused on Springfield's seedy side of politics. You probably see him at Haigis Mall all the time.

Here's a video of Tommy talking about why he likes Amherst.