onfocus

A week ago I closed ORblogs—a project I started in March 2003 and worked on in some way or another every day until last Thursday. The site was a directory of weblogs based in Oregon and a post aggregator that gathered together posts from those blogs. The site sliced and diced posts by topic and city, and gave readers a way to quickly scan who was saying what, where in our state. At various points it was also a photo-sharing site and general virtual gathering place for Oregonians. I closed the ORblogs discussion forum sometime in 2007, and closed the photo-sharing portion of the site in January of this year. Even with the leaner, meaner ORblogs I found that I simply didn't have enough time to devote to the site that it needed. Traffic to the site had been trending down over this year while blog submissions were growing exponentially. I knew that as the number of blogs in the directory grew, there needed to be new ways to organize posts so readers could find what they're after, but I didn't have time to code it.

In the wake of the closing I've received many emails of thanks and support. I appreciate it, especially knowing that many are losing a daily web destination and source of readers for their blogs. I also received many offers to take over maintenance, but because the code wasn't written for public consumption in mind, it's a Rube Goldberg-esque series of pulleys and levers that would drive someone who isn't me insane. And to be honest, I wasn't sure there was enough interest in a general-topic, local aggregator to make it worth someone's effort.

But I found there was quite a bit of interest after Portland tech community maven Rick Turoczy posted about the closure on Silicon Florist: Can ORBlogs be saved? And John Metta in Hood River began organizing an effort to build something new: Roll your sleeves up.... That was followed quickly by Lewis & Clark College in Portland offering to host a new Oregon weblogs directory. I talked with John on the phone on Wednesday night, and he posted a summary of our conversation: Talking with Paul Bausch about ORblogs.

As John mentions, I still believe in the idea that community aggregators can provide a view of blogging that you can't get from a personal newsreader. That made closing the site an extremely difficult decision, but I didn't have time to take the site to its next stage. I'm looking forward to seeing what Metta and crew build because with the current level of energy around their project, I think they can make that next stage happen.

I run a site that pulls together blogs and posts by people in Oregon called ORblogs. The idea started as this post on this site: Oregon Weblogs, after I met Michael Buffington and Nick Finck for the first time at SXSW in Austin that month. I found out they both lived about 45 minutes away and I thought there should be some way for local bloggers to find each other.

I set up ORblogs.com with a simple link list of the Oregon bloggers I could find. Then a few months later (three years ago today) I moved from a simple list of links to a database-driven site that gathers posts and information about the blogs. And I moved from actively finding weblogs, to making the site a voluntary, participatory space. In fact, if you go to the blog detail page for this site—onfocus at ORblogs—you'll see that the date my weblog was added is June 3, 2003. A quick SQL query tells me there are 58 weblogs that are still active and were added that day. There are currently 1,055 active weblogs in the directory.

I've been able to virtually get to know a number of my fellow Oregonians by reading the site daily for three years, and I think it's helped me get to know my city and state better than I would have otherwise. I've even met a few bloggers in person, and I'm not sure that would have happened without the site. I also appreciate the fact that I see diverse viewpoints from people across the state. I don't always agree with everything I see flowing through ORblogs, but I think it's healthy to read outside of my normal ideological bubble once in a while.

So I just wanted to mark the milestone with a post. I always have grand plans for ORblogs, a whole stack of ideas I'd like to implement that would help connect Oregon bloggers and their ideas together. (I've been talking with people about an ORblogs get-together forever, that'd be a fun way to connect with other bloggers too.) But the site is a side-project, and I'm not making any money from it. Hopefully someday I'll figure out how to turn the intangible value I feel from participating at the site into tangible value so I can focus more time at ORblogs—a classic personal Web dilemma.

I'd also like to take this post to say thanks to all of the Oregon bloggers who have chosen to participate at ORblogs, who bother pinging the site, and who are teaching me more about Oregon every day. The site wouldn't exist without the Oregon blogosphere collectively nodding in ORblogs' direction.

Webvisions was fun, and the ORblogs lunch was great too. I don't mean to blog-drop, but how often do you get to dine with folks like Alan, Cat, JD, Matt, and Michael? It was great to hear what everyone's up to, and I'm hoping we can all get together in person more often. We agreed that it would be fun to have an official Oregon weblogs event sometime.

Today a truck dumped seven cubic yards of bark in our driveway. We did ask for it. But you don't know how much seven cubic yards is until you see it. Sitting in your driveway. Ahh well, lots of landscaping to do. The garden is going to look great. (I keep forgetting to take before pictures.)

In a blatent ripoff of er, homage to Matt Haughey's Ask Metafilter and Ask PVRblog, I put together a site for Oregonians called Ask ORblogs. The idea is the same: anyone can ask a question, and hopefully someone reading will be able to answer the question or provide some info. Ask ORblogs won't have the sheer number of people that Ask MeFi has, but if local bloggers tune into the site once in a while, I think the concentration of local Oregon knowledge would be much higher than you'd find at Ask MeFi. Of course the questions don't have to be Oregon-specific, but I think that's where the site will be able to help people the most.