fresh blog
The Voice has a story about Friendster.com. (Scanning this week's issue, it occurs to me that The Voice should really buy Gawker.com. I don't know if Nick is selling, and it might be difficult for Gawker to keep its "integrity" [an odd word for what is essentially a gossip blog, but still somehow apropos] with a merger. But The Voice needs something to make it feel more... now. I don't even live in NYC, but my favorite part about Gawker is the daily round-up of local events. It feels so much more fresh than that weekly calendar stuffed in the middle of alt-weeklies and the first 20 "Goings On" pages of the cool-clueless New Yorker. Here in Minneapolis, Babelogue [a collection of writers/editors from the Voice-owned alt-weekly, City Pages] is trying to figure this out. It is a good -- sometimes great -- resource for the community, but it occasionally feels like, well, a cabal of alt-weekly writers [I say that as a former one]. Babelogue excels when it feels like a cross-sectional representation of the city in which I live; it's less than great when it feels like a strip mall of blogs [à la Salon]. It's an experiment of local voices that might just be the key to this global-local puzzle some of the most creative internet minds still haven't figured out yet. Or maybe Anil had an answer, and now we'll never know.) Whew, that was a long parenthetical. Bad Rex, no links today.
