Thursday, May 01, 2008

[Above: Anchor Rising's Justin Katz, Marc Comtois, and Andrew Morse]

Thanks in good measure to the pioneering efforts of Rhode Island's Future and Anchor Rising, the Rhode Island blogosphere continues to grow in variety and sophistication. I look at this trend in this week's Phoenix:

There are, to name a few, locally based blogs for tech geeks and entrepreneurs, the legal community, same-sex marriage proponents, industrial designers, the young and irreverent, Democrats, and Republicans, and those concerned with intellectual property.

For communities sometimes overlooked by the Providence-centric media, the presence of sites such as Hard Deadlines, which focuses on Portsmouth, or RI’s Twelfth, which emphasizes that state Senate district, enrich the information landscape. ....

Picking up on a recent New York Times' story about the unexpected death, in one week, of two middle-aged bloggers, Lee Drutman, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California-Berkeley, used an April 15 op-ed in the ProJo to contend that the constant appetite of the blogosphere is bad for the body politic. ....

To be sure, there are shortcomings to be found on local blogs, particularly a periodic excess of personal attacks and a mix of bitchy and moronic comments, the short observations made by readers, that can be variously tasty or enervating.

Ultimately, though, Rhode Island bloggers rise or fall on their ability to present compelling information and trenchant points of view.

Marc Comtois, a regular contributor to Anchor Rising, sums this up well: “For me, writing a blog post helps me to strengthen my own thought process with regards to what I believe. If I’m going to pre-sent an argument for or against something, I had better be clear why I’m taking the stance I am."