Earthling

I've written several entries about how blogs can be useful. The conversations I had in New Orleans last week made me think a lot about a type of blogging I haven't covered. There's a lot about post-Katrina New Orleans that makes local blogging there something of a different animal from other places. For one thing, as an outsider and a year later it's easy to forget that everyone was displaced and scattered across the country for a while. When the residents of actual physical neighborhoods are split up and scrambled, having an "online community" isn't so much a hobby or side interest as it is a necessary substitute for the real thing to keep communities together. And all the more so when everyone got back in to the city and set to rebuilding.

For another, neighborhood planning and redevelopment is a complex, constantly changing landscape. Judging from the bloggers at the table on Thursday it can be very difficult for residents to keep up with an evolving set of meetings, elections, requirements, and processes. In that climate, bloggers lean on each other to make sure the word gets out about any new announcements, and that all of the meetings are well attended and documented. It's not so much about making pronouncements to the world or being a witness to history; it's about sharing information with the people who need it and pooling attention and resources. ThinkNOLA and the New Orleans Wiki also play an instrumental role in that.

In a tightly-knit community where everyone knows and reads each other, blogs can also often carry double meanings. Blogs are usually considered an entirely transparent medium. But a carefully worded blog entry can function somewhere between an "open letter" and a wink, to send a specific message to a specific person or group of people while most readers only get the surface meaning. I'm sure this happens in lots of places, and often in the context of personal relationships (and probably anonymous blogs as well). But it's easy to lose sight of that subtler side of personal publishing when you focus on the ability to reach large and disparate audiences.

Many blogging communities organize around a common interest, hobby, fan base, or line of work. It's interesting to see how In New Orleans, some of the most fitting applications for blogging and social technologies have centered around practical needs and actual communities that are in flux.

Update: The San Antonio Express-News published an article on this very subject including interviews with Alan, Editor B, Michael, and Karen Gadbois.