January 17, 2005

(Updated) OregonLive Reportedly To Launch 'Group Blog'

Part Of Larger Project From Advance Internet

Note: This post has been updated. Any and all updates appear at the end of the original post.

Since opinions of OregonLive are certainly in no short supply in the local Portland blogosphere, an announcement from Jeff Jarvis is worth passing along here.

Jarvis is president & creative director of Advance, the power ultimately behind OregonLive and other regional websites affiliated with the newspapers in their respective markets. Earlier today, he announced a new job position -- but its his description of the project itself we are interested in here.

Advance Internet ... is about to create a half-dozen town blogs in those markets -- new, group blogs (using iUpload) to which any neighbor can contribute. These will live alongside the many individuals' blogs, local forums, newspaper headlines, blogs outside the services (and their RSS feeds), and more. The idea is that ... people may not want to start their own blog but they have plenty of news to contribute to their communities: opinions, news updates, sports reports, photos, calendar items, and so on. The hope is also that once we have a critical mass of content in a town from all these sources, a critical mass of audience is sure to follow.

According to Jarvis, the person hired for the new position "would recruit uberbloggers for towns and help them beat the bushes to find more bloggers" and "supervise them and come up with procedures for how they should work" among other duties.

Jarvis mentions iUpload as the content management software of choice for this project, as opposed to the Movabletype installations which power the individual weblogs at OregonLive (and presumably other Advance sites as well). That software apparently is currently being used by sites such as The Northwest Voice.

We were going to seek some comment on this from Kevin Cosgrove, editor-in-chief of OregonLive, but that will have to wait, since somewhere along the line we've managed to misplace his email address. In the meantime, although there's little at this point to go on, feel free to post any thoughts based upon Jarvis' description of the plan.

January 20, 2005

Update

In a comment on another site, Jarvis reveals some more of Advance's plans. We imagine that many local readers concerned with OregonLive may find the new information interesting.

... I have said that once we upgrade a feature we're working on, we will put up RSS feeds from those blogs and send them traffic and we will offer them RSS feeds of our headlines to give them more content. The more the better. All blogs rise on a tide of links.
...
... [M]y real hope is that we can create a network of local bloggers and sell ads across that network and thus help underwrite and support the work of those local bloggers. That is quite unproven but that is where I would like to see this go.

So, in theory, OregonLive may in the future be carrying RSS feeds of other Oregon bloggers, providing RSS feeds of headlines, and participating in a sort of ad network experiment intended -- at least this is how we read the above -- non-OregonLive local blogs in addition to the site's own blogs.

Posted at 05:02 PM | PermalinkComments (8) | TrackBacks (1)
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Comments (8)

  1. pb on 17 Jan 2005

    The cynical side of me (well ok, both sides are cynical) sees a project like this as an attempt to stop people from creating their own weblogs--to harness the energy of blogging for the purpose of selling advertising.

    Why not offer weblogs to anyone who wants one instead? How would this be different from the current OregonLive discussion forums, beyond a slight format change? Unless they embrace the weblog conventions of a cleaner (read: diminished advertising) design, I don't know why people would choose this over their own space. The power of a built-in audience is strong, but that's why there are spaces like (PLUG) ORblogs. ;)

  2. The One True b!X on 17 Jan 2005

    Paul's skeptical comments generally mirror my own feelings when it comes to centralized blogging of this sort.

    At the same time, you could take that same argument and ask why something like Portland Indymedia doesn't just help everyone get their own blog. So the issues perhaps are murkier than my inherent skepticism makes them seem.

    Certainly the commercial aspect is one of the elements which will cause much discussion. If you click through to Jarvis' full post, you'll see the initial remarks about advertising on this new project. That's going to generate discussion (at least I hope it does) of whether or not the contributors to this new system are going to get a cut of that advertising, or whether it's just going to go into an Advance pot and the bloggers/contributors themselves just get their name published on the Web.

  3. pb on 17 Jan 2005

    ... why something like Portland Indymedia doesn't just help everyone get their own blog.

    Great point, and I think they should be encouraging people to "own" their own spaces on the web...and work to aggregate relevant information instead. (Though being able to post anonymously is a big feature of indymedia sites, not as easy when you sign up with a service or own a domain name.)

    These types of centralized experiments remind me of cable access TV. It was a great hope that cable access would allow anyone to have a voice on television. But cable access was marginalized, unfunded, and turned into a "ghetto" alongside the "premium" offerings of national networks. As soon as an OregonLive uberblogger posts something that is offensive to advertisers, the plug will be pulled and their voice will be gone. Or if offensive content is allowed to stay, it's chalked up to "those outsiders" over there in the weblog section.

    Starting your own weblog is so easy--and even placing Google ads (with more services to come) is fairly easy--so I'm not sure what need they're filling with this service, beyond the perceived audience. Bloggers can be paid for their own writing in a space they own already.

  4. The One True b!X on 17 Jan 2005

    Distributed ultimately is better than centralized. It's one thing if a website provides some form of centralized aggregation of content from other sources, and another if they themselves are where people publish.

    In the first case, the choke point of removing content only removes a pointer -- because the content was published elsewhere, it still exists, it's just not being linked by the aggregator.

    In the first case, the choke point of removing content actually removes the content itself.

    Seems clear which is preferred.

  5. Brad Stenger on 18 Jan 2005

    I was just about to contact both of you & Kevin Cosgrove to see about doing something with Personal Telco and Free Geek in this vein. I think they have motive and means, but could probably use help with labor and $$$. The criticism b!X dropped on Harvard got me thinking that as long as there's a digital divide, blogging really isn't an equal opportunity sport, and not 100% credible. Grants exist (http://j-newvoices.org) to help with funding.

  6. paul_lukasiak on 19 Jan 2005

    bottom line...

    this is one of those attempts to create a "new business model" for mainstream media corporations. Now, what happens if someone posts something negative about "Portland Meat Market" and "Portland Meat Market" is buying an ad that appears on that page?

    In other words, it sounds to me like the scheme is antithetical to what "blogging" is all about. Jarvis is looking for ways to co-opt the whole blogging phenomenon, and fill in pockets by doing so.

  7. Mitchell Santine Gould on 19 Jan 2005

    "as long as there's a digital divide, blogging really isn't an equal opportunity sport"

    No. This is just plain wrong.

    A talented poor person who really wants (and can make use of) a blog will forego cable TV, DVDs, boom boxes, monthly visits to first-run movies, and designer sneakers in order to concentrate on what he or she is called to contribute to the blogosphere.

    The digital divide isn't about money; it's about priorities. At a deeper level, it's about a fundamental information-seeking trait in one's personality. Rich or poor, some have it; some don't. That's human diversity. You might as well say the digital divide includes the snooty executive who only likes to watch golf and never learned to type.

  8. Dave Myers on 21 Jan 2005

    Here's Kevin's email: kcosgrov (at) oregonlive.com
    (The missing "e" at the end of "kcosgrov" is intentional.)

Trackbacks (1)

  1. OregonLive Getting In On the Local Group Blogs on 20 Jan 2005

    b!X pointed out this entry by Jeff Jarvis, the main man over at Advance Internet (owner of OregonLive), in which he describes something not to different than portland.metblogs.com: "... about to create a half-dozen town blogs in those markets --...