Blog Report: New Local Blogs

Now that Thanksgiving is over, I thought I’d treat you to an early Christmas present. Money? Jewels? Stocks? iPods? Bah, what good are they? No, instead I’m giving you the kind of gift that really keeps on giving: New local blogs.

Let’s start with photographer Ian Curcio’s excellent photoblog, which I only recently realized he had, even though I’ve known him casually for more than a year and been looking for local blogs for even longer than that. Filled with outstanding photos (although not too much in terms of text to tell you what you’re seeing), Curcio’s blog is absolutely worth bookmarking.

Kimbi Yates by Ian Curcio.

Last week I went out with local poet and musicians Moody Black and Kimbi Yates, a husband and wife team that keeps the scene hopping in the Upstate and has a great positive attitude towards life. We stayed in a single parking lot and worked for a couple of hours using for the most part, only one light. The work was being shot for an upcoming CD as well as use for social networking sites.

Next up, we have Liar (or maybe Trade Skills, it’s hard to tell), a blog so cryptic, conspiratorial and intentionally obscure that I’m not really sure what the deal is. I very briefly encountered blogger Matthew Tripp outside of a recent City Council meeting where he handed me a printout of very dense text, his two phone numbers, a photo of his drivers’ license and his “career readiness certificate.”

I have no idea what’s going on here, and it’s not like Tripp is making it easy on anyone who’d like to know more. It reads almost like those randomly generated SPAM posts you get on blogs, but with just enough coherence to think that maybe, just maybe, there’s a point buried in there somewhere. (Plus, SPAMmers don’t hand out fliers at City Council meetings.) But that’s just what makes his blog so unique. Check it out and see what, if anything, you can decrypt.

Here’s a sample from a recent post. See if you can follow where he’s going with it.

Show the virtual reality game of university administration as process outline modification effects…. for the creative commons iPhone flowchart flashcard application bluetooth projector by blockposters.com wall mural (flowmotion book style) process outline overlay GTD flowchart plus middle school conflict resolution, auto mechanic, restaurant dishwasher / salad or fry and prep, kid’s homework flowchart to clean their room GTD podcast, college dorm lifestyle and roommates like kitchen / bath / laundry / living room house rules troubleshooting flowchart which at restaurant stations switches mural posters not like the poster sales places but on a leftright slide shuffle… and the following of the twitter, ning, facebook, blogs, professional journals, real time information (dissertation and thesis context realtimeline maps the duration of your college experience non-tenure) as research assistant for ecology students + sociology or anthropology + political science + nursing students… their curriculum is so technically dense that they have no time to correlate real time media to their studies… then the newsletter goes to friends and other students each week or month for 25 cents to one dollar… price decreases until the best green bloggers take over the task and perform the service for free off the ad revenue without india greenwashing.

Let’s move on to something a little more thematically clear, shall we? How about a fishing blog? Nothing esoteric to figure out here, just a rod, a line, some bait, a human and (hopefully) a fish. Here’s Lane Miccio’s Fishes for Wishes blog. And what sort of insights does Miccio have? Evidently, environmentalists are stealing our fish-related jobs!

This week has been all about research, research, and more research. I also did some research. I’ve gotten tons of useful articles and websites from our excursion to USC upstate, and I have also taken a trip to the public library and gotten a few useful books. Luckily, there were plenty of sources on environmentalism and its negative effects on commercial fishermen and their employment. So that was the small victory of the week.

That’s it for this week. For more local blog-on-blog action, check out SparkleCityBlogs.com.