Why

Part One

For the last several years, I've burned the midnight oil creating a collection of directories called Community Color. The goal of this project is to explore the way that local communities are reflected on the web. I am from the Mountain West. I was born in Denver and have lived in a variety of towns in the Mountain West. So the effort concentrates on communities Mountain West. In this project I've indexed a variety of towns that I consider to be cultural centers of the area.

The goal is to show the diversity of things that exist in a community. The directories are inclusive. I list any site I find from or about a community (well, except porn or hate sites). These community directory are my primary statement about the direction we should be taking on the web.

In 2003, I decided to start a blogspot blog. I had spent so much time on the local community (with absolutely no reward for the effort) that I decided to just do a mind fart blog on whatever.

As with most mind fart blogs, whatever often turns out to rants about national politics.

I had a progressive education. In my progressive education, I was taught a propaganda technique called "Critical Thinking." The idea behind critical thinking is to criticize American culture, the free market and people on the right. Being hypercritical of America is supposed to somehow lead to social justice and progress.

I finally realized that critical thinking and progressivism are both dead ends. But I have yet to learn a new writing style.

The reason I mention this is that my blog and community sites have completely different bents. The blog concentrates more on national issues and universal thought and is often negative. The community sites focus on the community and are of a more positive nature.

There actually is a message in this. It is my belief that the best way to affect change is to think locally and act locally.

Unfortunately, the message of the two efforts get in the way of each other. Most people who read my blog simply think I am a jerk.

Part Two

IMHO, the primary value of a blog is in the field of social networking.

For that matter, if I were to give a single message about blogging, i would say the best approach to the art form would be to concentrate one's effort on blogging about the local community. There is very little need for people to blog about national politics. Contrary to our education. Critical thinking posts generally just lead to partisanship.

I think there is a greater value in blogs about the good things in the local community.

IMHO a great blog would have links to all of the little hidden treasures in a community, and should have a blog role with other local sites. I am not doing that with this blog because I do so with the directories. Capiche?

Blog Role

Anyway, this "why" post is to explain why I am not doing this blog the way I think blogs should be done.

The reason, of course, is that the community directories are my community effort. I do not have a blog role on this site because the community directories list well over three hundred blogs. I really didn't want to waste time doubling up the effort and listing all the blogs twice.

I just created a blogs page which is a master index to the blogs to which I link. The total is currently 350. Yes, I've read a large number of posts in all of them.

Next: The answer as to why I don't have a blog role is that the community directories are my blog role.

Next: Why is this blog so icky? Well, it is just a mind fart blog.

Finally: Why did I just write this post: Well, I wrote this post so that I could link to it from my blog index.

Swim in the Bitterroot

I was called away to Hamilton, Montana and will miss the elections. It is ashame as I would love to vote for a more open and productive education system.

Coco took a swim in the Bitterroot. The water was all shivery cold, but she had so much fun. She would have played 'til hypothermia set in. Speaking of hypothermia, I think that, on average, people in Montana spend more money on coats than people from Utah. My warm winter coat appears a bit pathetic.

Quite frankly, I hate releasing green house gasses just so I can stay warm. In Salt Lake, it is possible to heat a living space just by baking some bread. For that matter, I've gone years without turning on the heater in my apartment. Of course, I tend to work 12 hour days and just use the apartment for sleeping. So 52 degrees was adequate.

Anyway, Coco went swimming at the Kiwanis River Park. The park has this nifty feature where they carved little animal figures into the tree stumps. They had a similar statue in the Denver City Park.

Someone upgraded Salmon, Idaho by placing a bear statue in their new river park. Creating public right of ways along rivers and green corridors fits perfectly in the scope of what local community governments need to do. Salmon had the problem that an old gas station and abandonned cheese factory had polluted the soil in the prime real estate near the Salmon River. Transforming the area into a city park was a wise decision. This is especially true in a town that derives a great deal of income from the rafting and recreational fishing industry.

Slow Foods

One of the really cool ideas that is taking off on in the information is the idea of Community Supported Agriculture. CSA is a way to get fresh locally produced foods from the farm onto kitchen tables. Rather than shopping at a store for vegetables, you buy a share of a farmer's crop. You pick up your portion of the crop throughout the year.

CSAs are a bit information intensive. The farms that engage in this practice need to send out newsletters and harvesting schedules so that their customers can have some idea of what to expect. Farms are also wise to share recipes.

The site Slow Food Utah has information on CSAs, Farmers Markets and other techniques to reacquaint people with food. I've had food from East Farms.

The only real problem with slow foods is that you end up needing to schedule yourself around the food. IMHO, the effort needed to sync one's life to the harvesting cycle of the land has all sorts of benefits. It saves a great deal of engery. You get better food and probably live a healthier life.

Since this is a political blog. I guess I need to say something political. When I was a kid big agriculture and processed foods were seen as progressive. Small farms were seen as quaint, old fashioned relics. Preserving such farms was a Conservative issue. Today, it things seem to have flipped flopped and the progressive community has embraced the idea.

I think that supporting small farms and encouraging the consumption of local produce is a good idea regardless of one's personal's political perspective. Here are some Salt Lake Agriculture Links.

Startup Princess

I've been reading posts on Start Up Princess. This site from Provo is putting together a network of women entrepreneurs.

Yes, I know, I am not supposed to be there. I was actually harvesting links from the site. That's where I found Raw Melissa. Anyway, I think groups like this show entrepreneurship at its finest. The basic metaphor for the site is that the market is a magic kingdom. The goal of the start up princess is to help motivate startups by providing resources including access to venture capital and a to a network of fairy godmothers. A fairy godmothers is a successful entrepreneur willing to help other women achieve their entrepreneurial dreams.

It is a fun metaphor, and people are putting together some really worthwhile ventures such as the Now I Can Therapy Center.

Unfortunately, many of the start ups listed on the site seem to be in marginal industries like scrapbooking. One thing that I worry about is that, since so many of the primary industries in our society are dominated by a few well financed conglomerate, we end up burning our entrepreneurial spirit on on low margin markets.

Again, I was on the site to do link harvesting, and a large number of the links are already broken as people's stab at marginal markets failed to manifest. Anyway, I thought I would blog on this resource because it might add more power to the Start Up Princess's magic wand.

Preserving Main Street

I love the traditional American Main Street lined with independent shops hawking their independent versions of the American dream.

Conversely, I dislike the sprawling soulless American suburbs with cookie cutter strip malls and box stores.

Needless to say, I’ve been greatly disappointed to see that the majority of growth that has occurred during my lifespan has happened in the suburbs. In most cases, the downtowns that I loved as a youth are less than they were when I was born.

The sprawling suburbs have consumed a large portion of the farmland and open space that excite the imagination and charge the soul.

For that matter, one of the primary reasons that I’ve wasted time creating community directories has been an interest in finding ways to preserve the great traditional cultural centers of America that I strongly believe are important to the American psyche.

Anyway, while surfing through the net today, I happened on two interesting sites. The first is the American Independent Business Alliance (AMIBA) from Bozeman, Montana. This organization proclaims the importance of supporting local independent businesses. (Something that my little directories do, and do quite well).

I digging through the various AMIBA sites, I found that many were intensely involved in efforts to preserve traditional main streets such as the Colorado Preservation Council.

My brain began juxtaposing two ideas: Supporting independent businesses and preserving Main Street.

It finally dawned on me what was wrong. The two ideas are oppositional.

Traditionally, Main Street has been the most dynamic, happening and changing place in a city. The reason that people used to flock to Main Street was because it was the happening place that was constantly changing. People used to flock to Main Street to see what was new, innovative and exciting.

The precipitous decline in Main Street began when preservationist councils and aggressive zoning boards started the process of hyper regulation of growth in downtown. Sadly, in most cases, the goal of the zoning board is to preserve the market share of a few powerful players in a city. While zoning boards have proven incapable of attracting business and people to an area, they are extremely adept at shielding powerful concerns in a city from competition.

The goal of preservation councils is generally to stop growth and preserve the character of an area as it existed at some point in the past. The goal of the preservationist is simply soak the town in bureaucratic formaldehyde; so that the downtown will never change. The fact that such sterile environments are neither conducive to the growth of business or to the public at large does not matter.

The traditional American Main Street is not simply an architectural style that existed at a given period of time. Main Street is a process of continual change. If Main Street is first and foremost a process of change, then the very cry to preserve Main Street is an oxymoron. How do you preserve an entity when change is the central to the nature of the entity?

If we really want to renew our downtowns, we need to find ways to reignite the process of continual renewal that defined the traditional Main Streets. We need to get back to the world where we see Main as a center of innovation, growth and improvement, and not as an ideal that existed in the past, that has been lost.

To preserve the dynamic character of downtown, we need to break from the modern mind set that values preserving old buildings to one that preserves the beating heart of Main. That living, beating heart demands continual growth and change.

The Planning commissions are not the ally of small business. Planning and preservation committees are the primary enemy of growth and small business.

Blogs and the Community

The last two blog posts were simply to point out that I see complex trends that have caused people and businesses to withdraw from traditional cultural centers. I see this as indicative of a trend of people to withdraw from participation in their community at large.

My experience in the technical field is that IT businesses are keen on defining their position in a global economy. People's initial investment in the Internet was aimed at accessing and defining a position in the global community. I know for a fact that many local artists built web sites to try and break into larger markets (as they had exhausted the demand for their work locally).

With so many businesses seeing the internet as a way to escape the tyranny of the local market, it seemed to me that the internet has been shaping up as yet another force that tears apart the community.

On the positive side of the ledger. I've noticed that personal home pages and blogs often have a reverse effect. Yes, there's a large number of blogs that simply pontificate about national politics. However, there are many more that talk about people's relations within the community. Some blogs like Weber County Forum are providing a great deal of insight into local politics. The suggess of the Utah Bloggers convention shows a very strong desire for even more community involvement from the blogging community.

It seems to me that the open forum of the Internet is creating a new and authentic balance between individuals, the local community and global community. Local blogs tend to have an interesting balance between one's concern with the world at large and the local community.

As local bloggers seek subjects for their posts, it is my hope that they focus more and more of their time examining they things that are immediately around them ... thus building a better understanding of the different things that build a successful community.

The Burden of Community

The last post (IT and Community) makes it sound like I believe that evil corporate America is conspiring to destroy the community.

I see the relation between the community and the organizations and people in the community as extremely complex. Community, after all, is both a blessing and curse. Business is not simply a process of manufacturing material goods. It is a process of interfacing with the community. I do not know of a single successful company that seeks to isolated itself from the community. The very idea is absurd because business is primarily about defining one's position in the world.

Since business is about one's relationship with the community. Businesses are guilty of spending a great deal of time trying to define and control their relation with the community.

An IT company might participate less in the local community than the corner drug store because the IT company sees itself in a different community. They might see themselves as part of a virtual world community focusing on a particular technology or problem. Forcing a researcher, whose every fiber is focussed on curing cancer, to clean plates at the civid center is absurd.

Businesses are sometimes at fault for Machiavellian games where they try to dominate a community. One can argue that the big box stores business model is an effort to dominate a community.

Since the primary concern of a business is defining a position in the community, I discard the accusation that corporate American has a primary aim of tearing apart the local communities.

While suburban office towers have the effect of isolating workers in a remote location. I do not believe that businesses are specifically sitting down trying to figure out how to worsen the quality of life experienced by the employers.

No, the drive to suburban towers is not driven simply by a desire to isolate workers from the community. A better description is that companies are seeking greater control over their presence in a community. The company wants control over the way they appear to the world.

Throughout my life, I have paid a fair amount of attention to the burdens placed on businesses. Since the 60s, our communities have systematically increased the burdens on stores and businesses operating in central cultural districts. The benefits of this increased burden gets distributed to the politically powerful in the community. This system of magnifying the burdens on small busineses is called progressive politics.

It is not simply that companies are withdrawing from urban centers. Many urban areas like Salt Lake City aggressively increase the burdens on small firms in their communities ... driving them away.

We look at the tendency of modern companies to shove their employees into office towers and other edifaces that are isolated from the community at large. It is clear that there are forces that are weakening the local community. I do not believe that we can find a single force to explain the trend. It seems to me that some communities like Rocky Anderson's Salt Lake City are hostile to small business, other areas like South Jordan are much more friendly to small business. Within a few years, South Jordan's population will equal Salt Lake. I don't think we can peg this trend entirely on the business.

It is something that we should try to understand.

IT and the Community

One of my primary concerns in making Community Color is the relation between the internet and the local community. Even before the Internet, I had noticed the IT Industry developing a tendency to separate its workers from the community. Living in the Silicon Valley during the first stages of the tech boom, I noticed computer companies developing corporate and architectural styles to separate their work force from the community. Community is just a distraction from the 18 hour work days demanded in IT.

The isolation of Silicon Valley workers contrasts to the hyper socialization that takes place in San Francisco just to the north.

Intentional efforts to isolate workers from the community reach extremes in the Salt Lake Valley. I worked for several years at an office tower in Draper. The office was three miles from the nearest restaurant or store. It was surrounded by parking lots and major roads. While the office was comfortable, the urban design of the area was set to simply isolate the people in the complex from community. Just before I went to the blogger's conference, I stopped and snapped a picture of the Altius building in South Jordan. It is just a big black building positioned so that workers have no destractions from the community around them. The workers will toil away, never seeing any of the other people building the community. Both Warren Jeffs and corporate American know that people become more pliable when you isolate them.

There are similar facilities peppering the Salt Lake Valley. For some forgotten reason, I rode my bike out to the Lake Park Office facility in West Valley City. I could not find a road between the community and the office park. Workers at the Discover Card call center, IHC and other information related businesses were hermetically sealed from the community.

The first stage of the tech boom seemed to be accelerating this mania of isolating people from their community. The corporate rush was to develop the big nationwide website that would dominate a sector of the market. The ideal internet firm was a windowless box in a sea of black top parking lots.

While the isolated towers of the suburbs have grown, we've seen the population of urban centers like Salt Lake and Ogden shrink. The primary cause of this is the excessively restrictive zoning of Salt Lake. My heart breaks each year seeing the little independent stores in Salt Lake proper board up their windows as the population of the SLC proper shrinks, while the isolated expanses of the burbs grow.

The reason I started making community directories and photographing towns was to understand the town. It is odd. I built a directory for Salt Lake City not because I had any special affinity for or knowledge about the area. I built the directory because I had spent some 30 odd years here feeling like a paria.

Knowing for a fact that I would receive zero community support for the effort, the sites uses mass affiliation (the ultimate anonymous business relations) to fund the site.

(This post is getting long so I will continue my rant in the next post)

Utah Bloggers Conference

Last night I attended the first every Utah Bloggers Conference hosted by UtahBloggers.com. This event featured free pizza, a t-shirt, an interesting panel and conversation. I generally avoid bringing my camera to meetings as I see bloggers with cameras one of the great annoyances of the modern. However, I figure that this, being an event about blogging, not only deserved a little photography, it demanded it.

Unfortunately, I had the F-Stop set wrong, and only got a few decent shots. Flowers don't move around of their own volition, and make better subjects.

Anyway, the meeting was organized by Ryan Money had a distinguished panel that included Cydni Tetro, Phil Burns, Phil Windley, Tim Stay, and Utah's next Senator Pete Ashdown.

Meetings like this are great because it inspires people to run home and pen articles about the local community with links to all of the people that they met at the meeting. The links give voice to those people involved in the community. Super cool.

Speaking of the local community, I just added a pile of entries to the Salt Lake blogs category. These entries pushed the site over the 5000 link mark!

After the blogger conference, the night was young and the light perfect, so I visited the South Towne Exposition Center and Jordan Commons for a little late night photography.

After taking and processing the pictures, I discovered, to my dismay, that the FTP server at my web host was hosed. Ggggrrrr. Instead of getting the pictures up on the day of the conference, I had to wait a day to get the friggin FTP problem worked out.

More Community Sites

I added two more sites to my family of web directories: Fort Collins (FtCollinsCo.US) and Durango. It will take awhile before I have enough links in these directories to be interesting, but I really like both of these towns. Anyway, it takes a couple of months for search engines to find new sites. So I figure that's not too big of a problem.

More on Locations

I will be spending the rest of the day writing up descriptions for locations. The biggest challenge I have is figuring out what to do with shared locations. For example, The Great Salt Lake is a location that is of interest to Tooele, Ogden and Salt Lake. It is not of interest to other communities like Moab.

I will probably end up having to break out the location into a complex join. It might be nice to have events for a shared location to show up in all of the calendars interested in the location. However, it is possible that an event taking place in the Wasatch Mountains near Heber is not of interest to people in Ogden.

As for paying for the site. My "if you build it they will come" attitude hasn't worked yet. So, I decided that I need to design programs with a goal. So, my goal is that I will display the location page 200,000 times a year. I made a summary page with a hit counter to track progress.

Name Change

I decided to change the name of my group of community directories from LinksAlive.com to CommunityColor.com. The new name does a better job describing what I am trying to accomplish with the directory. The purpose of the Community Color directories is to list sites for a geographic region. This makes it easy for people in an area to connect with others in their community.

BTW, I did not choose the name Links Alive. It was given to me. At the time, I really didn't care about the name of the top directory. Now that I am more emeshed in the project, I realize that the dynamics of communities demand that I build more interconnections in the projects, and the top domain is becoming important.

Anyway, I am likely to sell the name Links Alive after I go through the gradual process of changing the directory name.

The name Linksalive always bugged me. People who read the domain name often think "Link Saliva." It also sounds a bit to "link-exchangish" and spammy. The new name emphasizes the diversity of a local community.