Bespoke Blogging: Elmwood Strip

e:strip.orgCongratulations go to Paul Visco, who presented his MFA project to his committee (Josephine Anstey [chair], Loss Pequeño Glazier, and me) today. The project, which I’ve written about before, is the Elmwood strip community site, which has existed in various incarnations since 2002. The initial site was started as part of a Virtual Communities class, and has grown to become a large, influential, and interesting site over the past few years.

It’s interesting because it has grown up largely outside of the blogging phenomenon. It’s a bit like LiveJournal in this respect, but to an even more extreme degree. Paul made the site in response to the needs and the interests of the community, and as a result, it feels a lot like other blogs in some ways, and not at all in others. Judged on its own merits, it is a striking design, and has a very rich feature set. Particularly for community-based journalism/journaling, which has always been at the heart of the project, I think you would be hard-pressed to find a better platform.

But it is also interesting in the ways in which it integrates with the physical community–a section just north of downtown Buffalo surrounding Elmwood Boulevard Avenue–but manages not to integrate much with other blogs. Certainly, there are links to it from other prominent blogs in Buffalo, and it is widely read by bloggers in the area, but it has somehow managed–largely by design–to be a very place-based community website, and for that reason, among others, a particularly interesting collaborative community. Paul did a lot to publicize the site, but none of it was virtual publicity. Mostly, he linked to the site from the physical location: the side of his house, chalking the sidewalk, or t-shirts on people.

This entry was posted in Uncategorized and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink. Post a comment or leave a trackback: Trackback URL.

5 Comments

  1. Posted 8/24/2006 at 7:41 pm | Permalink

    Yeah, Paul!!

  2. Posted 8/25/2006 at 12:04 am | Permalink

    Thanks Dr. Halavais.

  3. Posted 8/25/2006 at 2:34 pm | Permalink

    It’s Elmwood Avenue, by the way. AT least Yahoo doesn’t know where the Bldv of the same name is. ;)

  4. alex
    Posted 8/25/2006 at 2:36 pm | Permalink

    Ah, thanks. I already forgot! Fixed it in the original post.

  5. Posted 9/7/2006 at 10:48 pm | Permalink

    Paul…congrats on the mfa! Let me know if there are any other mfa candidates here locally or regionally that are working on blogs or other community based journalism projects as a basis for their work…

Post a Comment

Your email is never published nor shared. Required fields are marked *

*
*

You may use these HTML tags and attributes: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>