Friday, May 02, 2008

Another Blog of the Day: Providence Daily Dose

Providence Daily Dose, although a relative newcomer to blogging, zoomed out of nowhere to win the hearts of Phoenix readers as best blog in our recent Best issue.

Powered by such bright lights as the absinthe-sipping, disc-spinning Eric Smith and David Segal, the coolest guy in the General Assembly (who's having another of his fun fundraisers next week), not to mention Scrabble-happy Beth Comery and the sometimes-salacious Jersey Girls, the Dose is pithy, colorful blog that is well worth your attention. Yeah, they were kind enough to link to my blog story, even though they got but a brief mention.

Here's what Eric had to say in a brief e-mail sound bite:

I'm not really sure how much actual impact our site has had on Providence or history in general, but people seem to appreciate the voice that we're putting out there. I believe we take an interesting slant on politics, local and otherwise and the culture that's out there in this city. We're funny, and there's not much funny and smart stuff out there, really, for folks to get into. Everything is either totally serious or absolutely ridiculous and there's not much in the middle except for us. I'm not sure why that is, people are smart in Providence and they get what we're doing. We're constantly getting complemented on how good our writers are, Ari and Ariel specifically, and I've gotten a few too! People like the Jersey Girls column a lot, and our hit rate has exceeded our original goal and now we need a new goal. I think people just like that we're here, everyday, all day long. Like the Weather Channel.

And here's some of what Segal has to say:

What has blogging meant to you as someone involved in politics?

It's a great outlet for me to communicate with constituents, promote issues of concern, inform people of events etc. I think that being associated with two of the more prominent blogs in RI has given me a bit more clout in the Assembly than I'd otherwise have.

Do blogs contribute to or detract from public discourse? Why?

More forums for discussion are necessarily better. Blogs allow for circumvention of the corporate media's filters. I think that they're especially useful at the local -- in RI, without blogs, where would one be able to turn for information, apart from a pretty small number of newspapers and tv stations owned by out-of-state entities?

They facilitate a form of point/counter-point that, previously, was impossible -- the ability to link directly to citations, to quotes, to detailed economic analyses, allows for much more rigor.

Any open forum -- whether online or at the public square -- will include a lot of static. And the anonymity of the blogosphere certainly yields a greater propensity for ad hominem attacks and name-calling and misinformation. But it's pretty easy to cut through all of this -- and is almost completely corrected simply by dismissing anything posted under pseudonyms. A regular reader of a particular site is pretty quickly able to learn who's trustworthy and who's not.

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