Cody and I woke early today. We made a trip for Cody's "hurry-up" and it felt surprisingly warm outside. The air was still and the temperture just a smidge above freezing. It smelled damp.
The street light committee on our block seemed unsure if it was really morning. Two streetlights had already turned off but a third holdout remained on, waiting for more evidence of morning. Perhaps the holdout was simply hoping to collect a bit of overtime for BG&E before spring's longer days arrive and reduce profits.
This is a fitting dilemma for Cody and me to ponder at the end of February. Is it spring or winter? Night or day? Will we have a few more weeks of cold and snow? Or will Joanne's spring flower bulbs soon announce springtime? We can't be sure.
Time for us to go back inside for coffee and wait for more evidence.
My goal on the show was to explain how web 2.0 tools can help us grow closer together as a community.
The snow storm provided an excellent example of how our local government, our local newspaper and our community collaborated using web sites, blogs, photo sharing sites, listservs and old fashioned can-do spirit to keep each other informed and safe.
Increasing social capital and social cohesion via web 2.0 tools is an answer to Robert Putnam's challenge in "Bowling Alone." I believe it's one of the ways that we will recreate stronger communities in the Internet Age.
Major media cover national news with thousands of reporters. Big city newspapers and electronic media cover metro stories with a few dozen reporters. However, not everything that is most important to our lives happens on Capital Hill or in the West Wing.
In a crisis, the most important thing to know might be what is happening right now on the next block. Major newspapers, TV and radio stations cannot cover our neighborhood. Web 2.0 tools like blogs, Twitter, listservs and Facebook give us the tools we need to inform ourselves. Information we need to stay safe, stay warm and to help one another. Web 2.0 tools support our first ammendment freedom in its purest form.
Blogs and listservs will never replace great community newspapers like the Laurel Leader. However local blogs and community newspapers can cooperate and serve the community better than either could alone.
Sometimes knowing where to borrow a shovel when your car is snowed under, or who has a warm cup of coffee when your power is out can be the most important thing in the world.
Laurel Leader's Editor, Melanie Dzwonchyk, has continued her unflagging support of digital publishing to keep us informed during the storm. Melanie has heroically filed online stories during the teeth of the storm proving that local journalism doesn’t need ink and paper to serve our community.
The Leader has published early and online this week. You can read theLeader’s latest snow story here.Kudos to Melanie and her team at the Leader.
It's too bad the Leader’s publishers refuse to create a professional website for our much beloved Laurel Leader. We are left with their absolutely horrible “explore howard dot com” website.
The fact that the “explore howard dot com” loses the brand identity provided by the Laurel Leader is sad enough. However, the technology that their site runs on must have been first deployed by Gutenberg himself. There seems to be simply no commitment to digital publishing by this publisher. It appears to be only an afterthought and is certainly not being worked as an emerging profit center.
I understand that community newspapers are losing money. But it's a damn shame that the people running Patuxent Publishing do not embrace the web and dedicate their time and energies to improving their digital editions. If there is any way to stop hemorrhaging money, the tourniquet must be built from their digital product.
Community news is vitally important to every small town in America. I have dozens of sources for national news. There are thousands of reporters in DC covering the federal government. But on a good day, we only have a precious few reporters like Gwendolyn Glenn and Melanie Dzwonchyk to tell us what is happening in our own back yard.
Come on Patuxent Publishing please give us a real community news website for the Laurel Leader. A website that lives at laurelleader.com and a website that carries a local brand and logo that we can identify with.
Cody and I are taking a break today. Here we are at the Laurel Connections Crisis Operations Center, i.e., the LCCOC. We are getting a bit of much needed rest between these historic and breathless snow storms.
Dogs and bloggers both need their rest after five days of tweeting, face booking, TV watching, emailing, non-stop eating, web surfing, aimless walking, photographing, general and specific malingering and the occasional nip of medicinal hooch.
Cody is keeping watch for she-who-must-be-obeyed (SWMBO). If we sleep too soundly, SWMBO gets all excited and assumes that we kicked the bucket. Cody's job is to make sure SWMBO doesn't haul us outside for special pick-up. The DPW guys are much too busy clearing the streets to drag our large carcass away to the landfill.
On an serious note, Council President Gayle Snyder emailed us this morning saying that Richard Kluckhuhn is concerned that his famousChristmas Treemay have been severely damaged by the February 6 storm. The Kluckhuhn family has brightened Laurel's Christmases for at least two generations with the lighted tree. This picture shows some of the damage. Let's hope that the tree can be saved for future generations.
