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Month: May 2008

The Ramble: The power of the blog (sometimes a little too powerful)

Published by Andre on May 24, 2008

One thing I’ve learned about blogging in recent years is how quickly a story can travel around, sometimes not allowing those that have learned about it to know about all of the changes taking place and leading to some rather pointed comments to be made. Then again, maybe it’s because as some folks tell me “I’m not mean enough to be doing this.” It’s definitely one of the scariest things about attempting to do this for a living.

The best example of this recently is the coverage by the blogosphere of Birmingham Mayor Larry Langford‘s decision to not issue a proclamation to the annual Central Alabama Pride parade on the city’s Southside. If you really don’t want to read the back story to understand this piece, click here to get to the point…

This morning’s Birmingham News ran a story with the online headline:

Birmingham mayor denies gay parade permit, The Birmingham News, 5.24.2008

The story stated that the mayor had decided to not only not issue the proclamation requested by event organizers, as first shared by Sweet Homo Alabama and Birmingham Blues on Friday (complete with the text from the email sent from Langford’s office), but also said that he would not issue them the permit needed to hold the parade (scheduled for June 7).

The text of the email included in Kathy’s post (about half way into it) did not contain any language that would lead one to believe that he would deny the permit, but did say that he would deny the hanging of banners in the area announcing the events and signing a proclamation.

Continue readingThe Ramble: The power of the blog (sometimes a little too powerful)

Well, I finally did radio

Published by Andre on May 7, 2008

I was on the radio yesterday morning here in Birmingham – 960 AM WERC to be exact. I was the first guest of a segment looking at area bloggers on the station’s new morning show hosted by Steve Shannon and Leah Brandon. It’s not the first time I’ve appeared on the air in town, but the first since I’ve become a web publisher.

As I was reminded by one of the volunteer contributors to The Terminal, talk radio really is the first and at times still purest form of engaging a lot of people in a conversation. Bloggers could really look at themselves as hosts and personalities, with the comments section serving as a slightly more hidden way to “take calls from the audience.”

I went on about an hour after Jay Saxon did (I will say that I’m convinced that Jay is one of those “adventure follows me everywhere” people…) and his appearance made me a little more relaxed about mine. For those that didn’t know, Jay was the “local Birmingham resident” in the midst of the devastation caused by the natural disaster that struck Myanmar recently. He’s also someone who previously appeared on this site as we followed his adventures in Beirut almost two years ago.

Anyway, it was fairly painless going on and both hosts were quite nice. They knew as much about me as I did about them, though I knew that I recognized both names from elsewhere in my travels and knew that for us to land both of them in this market says a lot about how far we’ve come from the days of The Radio Carousel, though I’m sure that many are waiting for the inevitable next rounds of moves.

Continue readingWell, I finally did radio