Fast Fiction

I was approached yesterday to do an interview on Radio Open Source later this month.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Because I’d never heard of Radio Open Source, and now that I have, I think you should check it out.

Basically, it’s a daily radio program where they do interviews with a bunch of people on a topic. Not new, I know. What is cool is that they announce their topics well in advance and have a dialogue about it before the show goes on the air. As it’s on the air, they take calls, and after it’s on the air there’s more commenting. It’s about as close as you can get to open source radio interviews. In addition, they use Delicious tags so that everyone can add their sites that fit into the topic.

Today I listened to last night’s story on Hyperlocal Journalism - they covered Lawrence Journal-World which serves Lawrence, Kansas, H2OTown in Boston,  and Baristanet from Montclair, NJ. Definitely take an hour and check it out.

What it reminds me of is the good old days when I’d go to the bank downtown in Mechanicsburg or worked behind the counter at Jo-Jo’s Pizza and the cops would come in or the mayor and I’d find out what was going on. It’s harder, I think, in big cities or places next to big cities to find out what’s really going on. What was that boom? A transformer blowing up, but how are you supposed to know that if it’s not in the LA Times? Sites like Blogging.la, LABlogs.com, BlogDownTown.com, LAObserved and to a certain degree LAist (they had a really good piece about the Grove and how the employees aren’t allowed to park on the premises and the landlord doesn’t give a shit about people getting killed going back to their cars a half a mile away). Silverlake used to have a blog like this, Park2Park, but without a big base of support and probably a good group to fill in the gaps when someone gets really busy, it’s hard to maintain when you have a real life on the side.

Kudos to those who blog locally. I don’t think I’m ever going to be one of those people, I’m too lazy to get the story right but I applaud those who can do it.