Results tagged “blogs”

Mike McGinn got the smackdown from local blogs. Is confidence in the candidate waning, or is the guy just having a bad week?

• Oh noes! It must be bank-robbing Thursday, as police investigate three two mid-day stick 'em ups.The robber(s) hit up a BofA in Renton this morning, then ventured to Cap. Hill to rob the Group Health Credit Union on 15th Ave., reports CHS Blog.
• Seattle's newest blog--err...sorry--e-magazine on the block, The SunBreak launched today. The site was created by a familiar moniker we all just so happen to know. (waving) Hi MvB!!

• The big news in local blogs today is the Seattle Times "collaboration" with hyperlocal blogstars such as West Seattle Blog, MyBallard, Capitol Hill Seattle, and Rainier Valley Post. Sure, there's warranted kicking and screaming about anything to do with the Times and online media, but is this the beginning of a beautiful friendship?
• Speaking of hyperlocal news, belltownpeople (giddy about being the densest neighborhood in Seattle) and CHS broke out mayoral race votes by 'hood.

Over here at Seattlest we are constantly amused by the stream of emails that come from the non-stop nagging, insulting--we don't need lipo! (yet)--or downright crazy types of people, although it does provide great inner-office banter. Well, now all those crazy emails have a home at Emails From Crazy People, the new site from those funny Seattle guys who brought you LOLcats and FailBlog. Besides airing out the crazy neighbor emails, tweets, texts, and other oddities, they'll be sharing voicemails, too!

We often say that the Times comment section specializes in crazy, but this weekend's post on the P-I.com heralding their site redesign has prompted a whole bunch of commentating goodness. The complaints vary, from "too much white space" to "too much focus on blogs" to "too many ads." As always, readers like the previous incarnation better, with some faux-threatening legal action ("I want to sue the Seattle P-I and get an injunction forcing them to bring back their old look."), while others claim they will no longer use the P-I, in favor of the Times. Now that's crazy.

Seattlest is shocked, shocked! to read that the freaking Federal Trade Commission plans to investigate bloggers who review and endorse products because (God forbid) they might have actually received those products for free. Duh. We hereby disclose that bloggers regularly get free stuff (tickets, books) in the mail, and we sometimes review the stuff we get (or see or read). Sometimes we like it, sometimes it's crap, and we say so. Why should the FTC give a rat's ass?

Similar to sibling rivalry over a new toy, the City of Seattle had first created a successful online blotter for the Seattle Police Department to share news and information, and now the Seattle Fire Department wants one too, darn it! To make it fair, yesterday the SFD launched their very own blog, The Fire Line, where they will cover the gamut of fire, hazardous materials, technical and emergency medical responses, local event information, and helpful fire prevention and safety tips. What, no firefighter calendars?

The city faces a $43 million budget shortfall. An unprecedented number of eyes (many of which belong to Seattle journalists and political watchdogs) are trained on the city's every budgetary move. We're just beginning what already smells like a contentious mayoral race towards elections later this year. What better time for Nickels and the city council to start meeting behind closed doors to work out the "very dull" budget-balancing process? Let media report on whatever they see fit, so the public can decide what's boring and irrelevant. That model works for hyperlocal blogs and it will work just as well for government.

UW atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass became a local internet celebrity seemingly overnight during last year's Snowmageddon, when he was forecasting weather in circles around all the other so-called weathermen. In addition to his blog, he's got a book, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, that came out last fall. His next lecture, "The Secrets of Northwest Weather Prediction," is tomorrow night at Town Hall (7:30 p.m.). Tickets are $5.

The (zippy) online version of the (staid) Times has discovered blogs. That would be the Times of London, you understand. Upstarts like the New York Times and the Seattle Times have to state their identity every time; no such need for the Times. But we digress. Lynne Robinson, writing a survey of food blogs for TimesOnline, lists no fewer than 50 of "the world's best," starting with Seattle's own Orangette. Comes at a good time for Orangette's Molly Wizenberg: her book, A Homemade Life: Stories and Recipes from My Kitchen Table, hits the shelves early next month. The TimesOnline piece is heavily weighted in favor of recipe-driven blogs, but even if you don't cook, Orangette's a great read. Good on ya, Molly!

Tomorrow morning, Wednesday, you can join Seattlest (MvB) and CHS (jseattle) for a eye-opening talk about neighborhood and news blogs and online marketing. We're holding the big event at Office Nomads on Capitol Hill (invitation with RSVP right here). The workshop is sponsored by the Capitol Hill Chamber of Commerce, begins at 9 a.m. (should be about 90 minutes with Q&A), and comes with a $5 suggested donation to the Chamber. We just went over the PowerPoint deck with jseattle, and boy is he good with maps and infographics. If you're curious about who the new neighborhood media are in Seattle or why to advertise with them, come by and enjoy a cup of coffee with us as we explain.

[UPDATE: This post has been edited to reflect corrections made by David Dobbs to his original post, which we quoted below.]

[ED. NOTE: Seattle Transit Blog strongly disagrees with Brad's characterization of their conclusions. They did some back-of-the-envelope figuring based on Brad's premise, with the intent of downsizing his initial estimate of the possible tax error. They are not interested, apparently, in the looking into the situation further: "But a figure in the low tens of millions of dollars is serious money, enough to do a freeway ramp or other practical project. I’d rather use that money to build a project they participated in the vote for than attempt to reconstruct 12 years of purchase records."]

BLOG-GAZING: We're going to The Pitch tonight, and as of this second, there's room for one more person on the guest list. The pitch this time is: "An established newspaper will never be able to provide better hyperlocal coverage than a well-managed neighborhood blog," and panel participants include West Seattle Blog's Tracy Record, the P-I's Big Blog's Curt Milton (we see Monica Guzman's on the guest list, too), and last but certainly not least if you ask him, CHS's lovely and talented Justin Carder.

Big ups to everyone who made it out to celebrate Blogsgiving last night. Cupcakes were devoured, pumpkin drinks were guzzled, hand turkeys were drawn, and normally antisocial bloggers actually mingled with one another (thanks to the aforementioned pumpkin drinks). With the help of you fine people, we raised nearly $400 for Northwest Harvest, along with a bushel and a peck of non-perishable food items. Many thanks to Grey Gallery for hosting, as well as our partners in crime, Seattle Metblogs, Capitol Hill Seattle, and Neighborlogs. Let's do it again next year!

Hey everybody, next Monday is Blogsgiving!

So 2,400 of you are reading this via your RSS feed, and congratulations! You can skip the rest of this post. What a time-saver that RSS is. For those of you who haven't tried it out, all you need to experience the digest-y gloriousness of RSS is a feed reader. There's all kinds. We use Google Reader, which also integrates with our Google home page--Yahoo! has similar functionality. And then there's Newsgator and Bloglines, in addition to add-ons to Firefox.

Alexa, the internetz rating service, is out with a ranking of Seattle's top 50 media websites. Not surprisingly, da Timez-&-Pee-Eye combo site, nwsource.com, is numero uno. Our good friends at Slog are in fourth place. Seattlest.com is a more-than-respectable tenth. WestSeattleBlog is 15th. Says Alex Mayer, publisher of dead-tree Belltown Messenger (#42) and live-electron Downtown Dispatch (#36), "The future of media is on the web."

• West Seattle Blog's photos of the sunset over the water remind us that we live in an absolutely stunning part of the United States -- and WSB also reports that something interesting involving fisticuffs (details vague as of yet) went down at Chief Sealth High School.
• Victory tastes so sweet... and failure? Well, resounding failure makes for a great blog entry. B-Town Blog has the details on a Kennedy 61, Highline 0 football game last week. Ouch.
• These are trying economic times, but Subterfuge Seattle comes to the rescue with hints for saving money the fashionable way. Step #1 is to share pants (no, really). Who needs $0.10 ramen noodles when you can share pants?

Cheapshit Condos does just what you'd expect: talks smack about "the new urban blandscape sweeping through Seattle." Oh, it's funny because it's true. Got any notably, terribly, cheap condos (or even better worse apartment-to-condo conversions) in your neighborhood? Send your photos and comments to cheapshit@cheapshitcondos.com. We'd love to buy the good folks at Cheapshit a drink, but unfortunately taking on the Seattle Condo Mafia requires author anonymity, if not the full-blown Witness Protection Program. Still, Cheapshit Condos, we salute you!

It was April, 2006, and a Seattle Times article about online food writers felt obliged to begin with an explanation of what blogs were all about. We've come a long, long way.

One more event for tonight: Christian Lander, the biting satirist of Stuff White People Like, makes a free appearance tonight at the Hideout (1005 Boren Ave) to shill the book based on his blog. There's a private dinner beforehand--begging the question "Exactly what stuff do white people like to eat?"--but tickets to that portion of the evening are long sold out. Show up any time after 8 p.m. to buy a book, get it signed, or just mingle and commiserate with your fellow Caucasians. Prepare for tonight by being offended at the very idea of such a tasteless event, and don't forget to bring your Asian wife and token black friend!

Seth over Sports NW just tipped us off to the bad news regarding the Tacoma News Tribune's Seahawks Insider blog, which won't be updated until training camp. Ironically, the blog's tagline reads: "Where there is no off season."

Ooooh—the Seattle P-I has launched their new crime blog, Seattle 911. It's a resting place for the flotsam and jetsam of the city's police and fire departments, where morbidly fascinated readers can take in side stories, breaking crime news, and details from daily reports.

The Craigslist ad reads:

Do you want to earn extra cash blogging about your community? MyZip.net is building the first nationwide network of neighborhood blogs. We will pay you $50 per month for writing about your neighborhood on your own ZIP code site (example http://www.98122.net).

Monologuist and fascinating human being Mike Daisey arrives in town next week for a Jan 18 - Feb 3 run of his show Monopoly! at CHAC, followed by a shorter try-out of his newest piece, How Theater Failed America. We got Daisey on the horn the other day and took a walk down memory lane with him, a la Dick Cavett, to soften him up before surprising him with hard-hitting questions about how many pictures he posts on his blog. Then we hung up and bought a ticket to the show.

As ChrisB of Three Imaginary Girls points out, losing your job sucks. Losing a job that meant a lot to you sucks more. And losing all that during the holidays? Well that just blows a goat.