watching expired appliances align

local links and commentary

Last week I realized that I want to know more about the town where I grew up than just what I read in the headlines of The Free Lance-Star, Fredericksburg, VA’s local paper. What I want to be able to view online is a blog like Gothamist, Gawker or blogging.la that covers the city and adds a bit of flavored commentary (okay, okay "snark"). I scoured Google typing in terms like: Fredericksburg, blog, weblog, Stafford, Spotsylvania, blogspot, and even livejournal. I couldn’t find much at all. I certainly didn’t come across any current blogs that looked at life in Fredericksburg or even a certain aspect of life in the area. I was pretty disappointed.

While reading the local paper today, I came across an article entitled Web Site Targets Beck (Bill Beck, Fredericksburg’s mayor). While Fred Bugle is not quite the site I was looking for last week (and I’m a bit frustrated that it didn’t come up in any of my searches) it seems like the kind of thing a good sized Virginia town needs. I’m not saying I agree with the articles published on the web site, although I did get a good laugh at the front page’s 469-word disclaimer. Actually, the only article I’ve read so far is about two baseball fields that have been vacant for at least the past year or two due to problems with the soil. The new site adds to the conversation and I like that.

Not only does Fredericksburg have a local newspaper with a regularly updated web site (I can even have the articles downloaded to my Palm handheld!), there’s also a local monthly paper called Front Porch Fredericksburg that publishes online. With the new City Council critiquing (lampooning?) Fred Bugle thrown into the mix there is a perfect niche waiting to be filled by a blog critiquing and commenting on all three sites. And I want more. I want a Fredericksburg blog that also covers the arts and culture scene. It should also include photoblog content.

This is where I get a little ahead of myself. I dream too much of being able to spend an afternoon reading about various cities not from their daily papers: but, from locally produced web sites that include commentary and links from a number of different sources. J.D. Lasica, Sr. Editor for Online Journalism Review, has a number of thorough articles on the subject of "participatory journalism."

I imagine in the mid-to-late nineties a lot of cities and towns created websites that listed contact phone numbers and other ‘welcome to our town’ features. It’s now time to revisit those sites, updating and modernizing them. A brief search lead me to a few blogs (The Dover (NH) Post, St. Louis Bloggers, and lawrence(ks).com blogs) produced in other cities that seem to do a good job heading in the direction of what I want from the Fredericksburg, VA internet community.

Perhaps a web site like this already exists for the town where I grew up and I just can’t find it? If you know of one, send me an e-mail (marc (at) balgavy (dot) com). I’m anxious to read what’s out there.