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Tuesday, August 30, 2005
The Life of the City
Parkdale
Amber & I went to Mitzi's for brunch.
 BLAMB: What are you having?
AMBER: There's only one thing that can complete such a sunny Sunday morning ...
BLAMB: The French Toast!
AMBER: Yeah!
BLAMB: Ok, I'm getting it, too.
AMBER: So, you're having lunches with bloggers?
BLAMB: Looks like it. I think The Blogger Lunch could be a good fall blog project. There are lots of bloggers and lots of lunches to be had.
 AMBER: Who's next?
BLAMB: Maybe Maria, so I can interrogate her about new dating drama developments.
AMBER: You'll get to meet people in different parts of the city. It'll be a good Toronto tour.
BLAMB: I was walking home along Queen a couple of weeks ago and there were lots of people out and it occurred to me that the city blogs -- BlogTO and Torontoist -- haven't evolved to the point where they give you any real sense of the actual city. Right now, those two blogs seem mostly like repositories for shallow news snippets and product placements. Sometimes when I visit them I feel like I'm reading the Yellow Pages.
AMBER: What's missing?
BLAMB: Repetition, for one thing. Each of those blogs need to pick some iconic Toronto things -- people, locations, landmarks, social cutoms -- and have them appear in posts on a regular basis.
AMBER: That's a good way of telling the story of the city without actually telling the story of the city. ... Food!
BLAMB: Both blogs would also be better if their writers weren't so anonymous. It makes them seem timid and I have no interested in getting my news from a bunch of frightened people hiding under a couch somewhere. Blogging is about personality! They should have bios and regular pics of all of their contributors. Check out BlogTO, you'll see photos ... but they're taken from a distance and there's hardly ever confrontation or engagement. The only way you can sense a city's personality is by engaging people.
AMBER: Like lunches.
 BLAMB: At lunch you actualy talk to someone. Torontoist's timidity is especially annoying because they write in a saucey, know-it-all, been-there-done-that tone that comes across as irritating because there's clearly no sauce on their goose. As an example, on one post the writer typed:
We crawled Queen West alongside Atom Egoyan and the Missus this weekend.
They were just spotting minor, local celebrities, which is a noble sport. But it's written up vaguely enough to make it sound like they might have actually talked to the director (in other words: confronted him) and that prompted someone to respond:
You can't just announce to us that you were randomly hanging with Atom and Ms. Atom-and-oh-look-there's-Sheila without explaining how you got to be there! Or is this just the kind of thing you do when you're Torontoist?
Forcing the writer had to admit:
i don't know any of these people, i was just enjoying my leisurely stroll along queen west, and seemed to be keeping pace with a shortish, spectacle-wearing man. Atom would probably stroll queen west with you though, if you are indeed an inner-city artist in need of some artistic edification. he seemed like an affable fellow.
 AMBER: Huh? How do they know that if they didn't engage him?
BLAMB: There are twenty things wrong with that post on eight different levels, but the worst occurs in those last two sentences when the writer tries unsuccessfully to mix being sassy with kissing Atom Egoyan's ass from a safe distance.
AMBER: And the "Ist Voice" really doesn't suit this city.
BLAMB: That whole know-it-all, corpo blog tone jumped the shark long ago. It's the fast food equivalent of blog writing.
 AMBER: Ok, which blog is better?
BLAMB: BlogTO is light years ahead of Torontoist because they aren't saddled with that irritating writing style. BlogTo's strengths: they let their writers post more than short bits of snip, they have an honest interest in culture and even if they don't lunch with them, they take an interest in the city's blog scene. Too bad they have such a lame tag line.
AMBER: And the other one?
BLAMB: Torontoist's main strength is being willing to experiment and be messier than BlogTO. For example, they actually tried to get a regular column going with "He Said, She Said", even though they picked the most overused column title in the history of hyperlinking. But much of the time, it just looks messy.
AMBER: Are they worth checking out?
BLAMB: They will be when they stop acting like newspapers and start blogging.
1:08 AM
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