Think globally, blog locally

I wish there was a blog where I could learn about the place I live and the people who live (and blog) here. I want to read about things to do, things to see, written by the people who are doing them.

The funny thing is there are so many people trying to solve this problem in different ways, all interesting, all addressing part of the problem, but no one gets close to what I want.

Here’s a quick survey of what’s out there:

Upcoming does events, Pollstar does concerts, Yelp does reviews, Daily Candy does fashion, craigslist does classifieds, Outside.in and EveryBlock do geo aggregation, SFist and Valleywag and Metroblogging do gossip and news, SF Gate and SF Weekly and the Bay Guardian have “sort-of” blogs, Eater SF does restaurants, Curbed SF does real estate, Rescue Muni and The N-Judah Chronicles do public transit.

What I want is something like a Boing Boing for San Francisco. A “directory of wonderful things” about the Bay Area, by and for the community. The MetaFilter model comes to mind, but less insular.

Of course the forward-looking part of me would like the concept to scale beyond San Francisco to any metro area, a la craigslist, because it’s hard to live here and not think about starting some kind of technology-cum-media company in your spare time. But let’s not get ahead of myself.

This, in essence, was the big idea that I alluded to last week. Not original or earth-shattering by any means (even MetaFilter Matt has blogged about this), but borne out of a frustration I’ve felt at the hands of the existing SF-specific blogs. And an awareness that I have a need that is not being met. And maybe I’m not alone.

It’s possible that the reason this type of blog doesn’t exist (in San Francisco, no less!) is because it’s actually impossible in practice. The very nature of a good blog has a lot to do with the personality and voice of the blogger, not the city the blogger lives in. Dooce is Dooce because of Heather Armstrong, and though Utah plays a primary role, I’m guessing Dooce would continue to be Dooce from anywhere. Because of our mobility, it’s hard for a blog to be rooted in a single place. And it’s hard to define San Francisco as a single place.

So how do you create a great blog about a place that doesn’t rely on a single voice?

Monday, February 4, 2008 1:43am
Blogging

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7 comments

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jackson
2/4/08 7:11am

It seems to me that this is the niche that SFist and its ilk originally set out to fill before they started focusing more on gossip. Seems to me that in SF of all places you could put together a group blog along the lines of BoingBoing.

Katie
2/4/08 7:50am

ahem (under blogs du quartier in the left hand column are some others for other arrondissements.)

BrianR
2/4/08 10:11am

To answer your final question… its damn hard. Ruby knows the most about hyper local blogs of anyone I know. Her 4+ years of work on OrangePolitics.org has been tough. But her success is due a lot, I think, to the fact she lived in Chapel Hill most of her life and knows a TON of people. (shes also smart as hell) The next big challenge is finding folks to write on the blog and to build trust so they make it a community of writers. At the same time I think a STRONG editorial voice over content helps too. But… this is how I see it. Lets ask Ruby…

andrew
2/4/08 2:05pm

SFist by Gothamist is pretty good.

justin
2/4/08 3:08pm

My 2 cents: I find SFist a little too news/politics/gossip for my tastes. It’s essentially a blog version of SF Gate with some San Francisco magazine thrown in. I don’t want a blog that approximates the local newspaper, I want a Boing Boing that focuses on the local scene. An alternative weekly in native blog format. Something that’s both insider and accessible.

Yeah BrianR, OP is an interesting beast, challenging because of the passions that politics inspire, esp local politics, but also just managing the commenting community and keeping the group bloggers happy and motivated.

I think my vision for a local blog would be fed more by people submitting their own blog posts about the city with some combination of manual/algorithmic filters about what gets posted. My desire is partly selfish, I wish there was a place I could submit a post when I’ve written something particularly juicy about SF, just like when I submit something geeky to BB or Digg.

This is the dilemma, do you set things up like Boing Boing/OP with human editors (which is hard to scale), like Slashdot with meritocratically chosen editors, or Digg, with completely algorithmic editors?

marcia
2/4/08 9:48pm

Sorry, you need humans. But I am biased, since I am a human.

The Digg model makes for too much noise. Now, that noise on Digg is mitigated thousands of posts and even more voters, so natural selection actually works somewhat. But when you are bound to have a small volume of posters, there better not be any stinkers or dummies in the bunch.

I think you know enough humans to make this happen.

justin
2/4/08 10:58pm

I completely agree—I am no fan of the Digg model. And I think over the long run the Gothamist/Gawker model has proved uninteresting. Though Valleywag is amusing if only for the fact that no one cares more about FM (after John Battelle) than Nick Denton. I’m definitely thinking about something more along the lines of MetaFilter/Wikipedia, at least as far as community involvement goes.

Poking fun at Nick aside, I have to say reading about his nanopublishing business model in the May 2003 issue of Wired really stuck with me. Ha, and look who wrote that bit, our friend Mark Frauenfelder.

“It’s a lot like funding indie movies,” he says. “Out of five, two might close down, two might be moderate successes, and you’ll have one breakout.”

Man that was almost 5 years ago. I was still in school back then.