The readers of City Paper have decided that Overheard in Pittsburgh is the Best Blog in town for 2006, an accomplishment that would be noteworthy if it weren't for the fact that "myspace.com" finished third. I didn't vote. My ballot would have shown a dead heat between the very, very serious Carbolic Smoke Blog (which gets a bullet for the name alone) and the literate and witty Tube City Online. But those might be better suited to Pittsburgh Quarterly's hypothetical list of "Best Blogs." Guess that makes me a charter member of the Cupcake Class.
O'heard is nice, but the CP profile of O'heard's author, Chris Griswold, pointed me to something that much, much better: Since late last summer, Chris has spearheaded WikiProject: Pittsburgh. A WikiProject operates within the Wikipedia enterprise. It's a volunteer effort to contribute content to Wikipedia on a specific subject. A WikiProject is member-based, but any Wikipedian can become a member. From the Scope section of WP: Pittsburgh:
This WikiProject aims to coordinate development of and improvements to articles related to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the surrounding metropolitan area in Western Pennsylvania, including Allegheny, Armstrong, Beaver, Butler, Fayette, Washington, and Westmoreland Counties.
This project aims to elevate the Pittsburgh city article to Featured Article status, improve existing Pittsburgh-related articles, and create new articles for Pittsburgh-related subjects that don't have articles yet. We may also seek to create Portal:Pittsburgh.
Tres cool. The image is an icon used to recognize special efforts by an editor to improve the project.
3 comments:
Well, don't waste your vote on something so frivolous as The Carbolic Smoke Ball, Professor. If you've ever looked at the right side of the Smoke Ball under "blogging community," you'll see two blogs at the top that are not in alphabetical order -- PITTSBLOG and Mike Woycheck's aggregator, Pittsburgh Bloggers. You were reading us back at a time when our only other fans were a few newspaper guys, before the New York Times sprinkled holy water on us and before our WDVE gig. So, thank you. But while we're busy ridiculing Pittsburgh, you're trying to rebuild it. This is the gold standard of locals blogs.
There is also Pittsburgh Wikimapia fwiw.
It was an honor just not to be nominated, but thanks for your kind words.
Post a Comment