Sunday, January 18, 2004

I am the Voice of Buffalo, darn it!

Today's edition of The Buffalo News has a big, front-page article on blogging, with profiles of three Buffalo-area bloggers. None of whom, I might point out, are me. Harumph. Harumph, I say! (I seem to be saying "Harumph" a lot these days. Must be something in the water.)

Anyhoo, I decided to turn to the All-Knowing Oracle in an attempt to find out why I so completely avoided detection in this fine journalistic endeavour, and I find that according to the Oracle (Google, of course), Byzantium's Shores is not listed in the top one hundred results for "Buffalo Blog". Seems to me a Google-bomb might be in order....you know, something like this: Buffalo blog. (My blog vanity knows no bounds, apparently, but I'd much rather be known by "Buffalo Blog" than, say, "Syracuse Lutefisk". Harumph, indeed!)

By the way, the three blogs profiled in the aricle are:

Berlin Blog
Outside the Law
Unknown Geek

Incidentally, I'd never encountered these blogs until the article in the News, which probably points out a lesson to be learned about looking around one's own surroundings. The Net is an amazing thing that allows the formation of friendships between people from disparate corners of the country and the world, but I wonder if sometimes we Netizens get so caught up in that aspect that we forget that there are interesting people blogging just minutes from our own doors. Our physical doors. You know, that rectangular slab of wood that you swing out of the way to accept the pizza from the nice kid in the ugly hat.

UPDATE: Well, once again the Buffalo News's web operation is, shall we say, a tad inept. The paper's print edition contains the story linked above, but it also includes a sidebar where one will find excerpts from these blogs, plus the URLs (which, except for "Unknown Geek", are not given in the main article). That sidebar is online -- read it here -- but the News doesn't link that sidebar from the main article! So, if you're reading this article online, you have no way of knowing about the sidebar at all. I'd really think that by 2004 the Buffalo News would have a website that wasn't so much of a muddled mess.

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