22 Weeks Later

By: Bob Mackey

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November 2, 2007

On a cold, grey, February evening, I moped my way over to the Vindicator building from my depressing temp job, where I got paid to sit in a chair and read novels while my employer slowly went bankrupt. But after work, I had more important things to do.  My mission: to sign a blogging contract for what would eventually become Valley24.com.  This mission was impeded by my inability to find an entrance to the Vindicator building, which, as legend has it, is one of nature’s few cube-shaped mountains, later carved out with pickaxes by hungry newsies looking for a scoop.  Some say you can still hear their tortured cries of “EXTREE!!!  EXTREE!!! echoing through the ladies’ room on the third floor.  But I certainly haven’t checked.

With 20 minutes of effort, I was able to slip into the building by bribing a foreman at The Vindicator’s loading dock with a notebook full of social security numbers acquired from said temp job (AKA “black market currency”).  So if you happen to be a SkyBank customer whose identity was stolen by a large, newspaper delivery truck driver named Roscoe, right now the problem is really out of my hands.  Believe me, I’m just as angry as you.

So where are we now?  Valley24 has been up and running for nearly half a year, constantly producing words, as web pages are known to do.  This doesn’t mean that things couldn’t be much better, though, so I’m here to do what I do best: tell people how to do their jobs.  That being said, here are my issues; consider me a focus group of one, which is kind of like that army slogan all the kids are so crazy about.

Let’s Talk About Blogs

Blogs: a good idea.  Certainly, it was ingenious to have independent bloggers produce a substantial amount of material for Valley24.  But a harsh lesson was learned in the process: it’s hard to find bloggers who don’t want to write “The Me Show Starring Me,” and even harder to find bloggers who can update consistently.  I’ve harped about this so much that I’ve even started to bore myself, so I won’t go on much further with this topic – but to be given a chance to share your writing with an entire community and then completely drop the ball is a remarkably poor decision.  I hope you people can live with yourselves, because I sure can’t.

To fix this lack of content, the site is sending up a bat-beacon for bloggers.  Good idea -- though if they’re having the same problems as I am finding people who want to blog, we’re in trouble.  Solution: there is an entire building in downtown Youngstown full of people who should be writing as much as possible; and if you guessed prison, you’d only be half-right.  Of course I speak of Youngstown State University and their English and Journalism programs.  Contacting these departments and telling them “Here is a good chance for your students to prove that their degrees will be somewhat meaningful” is the first step to striking blog gold – especially with the Journalism majors.  I’m not sure why Journalism majors have such an aversion to writing – maybe it’s the complete lack of talent – but when I was on The Jambar, hiring students to work for us was as difficult as getting people to write for a college newspaper.  Maybe these unmotivated souls need a brief preview of the job they intend to do for the rest of their lives?  In any case, we should force them.

My next unconventional, in-your-face statement about blogging is related to the blogging software of Valley24.com: it sucks.  Sure, with the current setup it’s easy for Johnny Luddite to whip up a quick chunk of text about his trip to Payless Shoes, but for people who want to make their blogs visually interesting, it’s a pain-and-a-half to add pictures and literally impossible to add video.  If I want to add pictures to a blog, I have to find my own offsite hosting (and since many people don’t know how to do this, Valley24 is tacitly encouraging image leeching) and wrestle with the extremely unintuitive software in a process which takes far too long.  We really need to have some sort of image uploading and storage system.  The current setup is a crime against man and nature.

And not allowing videos to be embedded in our blogs is a cardinal sin in this post-2005 Internet world.  Take a look at the most popular blogs and you’ll notice that YouTubing is rampant.  You risk being completely out-of-touch with your audience by ignoring this avenue of Internet wonder.  How can any of us post videos of fat people dancing and falling through plywood tables without this revolutionary technology?

All of these design problems could be solved with a better piece of blogging software or by giving us the ability to edit blogs in plain old HTML, but so far I’ve found no way to do the latter (tech guys, feel free to correct me on this).  We also need to encourage other bloggers to make their blogs visually appealing because people – especially young people – are scared off by large, uninterrupted blocks of text.  You don’t want your readers to realize that they’re actually reading.  I've found the only way to avoid this is by promising a string of upcoming curse words.

My final words this week about blogging are filled with profanity and have to do with the issue of user comments.  You’ll notice that most posts receive little to no feedback, compared to the feedback left in the earlier days of Valley24.  This is because of two reasons: 1.) People who used to write for the site were the most likely to leave comments in the past and 2.) No one wants to register just to leave a comment.  Anyone in the journalism biz knows that it’s hard enough to get readers to follow a story to another page; here, you’re asking these same people to go through a registration process that requires yet another user name and password.  Let’s allow anonymous comments.  We’re all big boys and girls, and we always have the ability to delete comments that add nothing to the conversation but the casual use of “faggot.”

That’s all for this week.  Before I go, though, I do want to add that I like Valley24 and would really like to see it stick around.  But at the rate things are going, we’re in a vegetative state and our husband is remarried and only Nancy Grace is fighting to keep us alive.  We just need to perform the necessary head-bobbing, moaning, and significant drooling to let people know that it’s not over yet.

Note: If you understood that extended metaphor, write down what it meant on a 3X5 postcard and send it to me in care of The Vindicator.  You could win a lifetime subscription to Parade magazine!

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