I’ll be voting for Jim Green and the Vision Vancouver team tomorrow, along with several great folks from COPE.
(Disclosure: I’ve been working for the Vision campaign — and they’ve made me proud.)
After so many years of watching this city struggle under a wet, grey flannel NPA administration that understood exactly nothing about what makes Vancouver great, the past three years have been a breath of fresh air.
Our city core is buzzing again, we have an actual night life, we have late-night buses, the Downtown East Side is starting to heal, other cities are looking to Vancouver as a leader in sustainability and social progress… it’s an exciting time in this city, and I’m going to vote to keep a good thing going. I hope you will too.
Two municipal election bits of blogging I want to point out:
- Ross at The Gazetteer has a series on why he’s voting the way he is.
- Ian King makes a point I actually wanted to make over on The Tyee’s article on media coverage of the municipal election, and why there’s so little blogging on it:
UBC J-school prof] Mark Schneider’s right about the Sun and Courier providing reasonable coverage. The trouble for bloggers is that both outlets’ web presence is less useful as blog fuel. Remember that most blogs are pure commentary and much of that commentary is informed by reports from the dreaded MSM. There are only a half-dozen or so stories in section A or B of the Sun that are outside the subscriber wall, with most of the municipal election coverage on the other side.
To which he adds another point: that you don’t get as much traffic from posting about local issues as you do about national or international politics, Macs versus Windows or Paris Hilton. (It isn’t just a question of Google juice. A lot of the joy of blogging comes from being part of a larger conversation. Writing posts that draw no responses isn’t nearly as much fun as writing some that do.)
One last possibility — we’re actually in an election campaign, and those who might be forcefully blogging for one side or another are busying themselves with getting their non-gender-specific-guys elected rather than weblogs. It may be interesting to see what happens to blogging activity among committed partisan webloggers once the federal campaign gets underway. I’m personally not a big fan of partisan blogging, but the committed partisans are generating a lot of the postings about national affairs (yech).
Macs v Windows? Agh. I’m of the belief that, at least since 1998 or so, you can do most anything you like on either platform, except when it comes to server-side work. For that. the Mac’s BSD underpinnings are a clear win. That’s not so much a statement in favour of Macs as it for a Unix-like environment; for those on PC hardware, may I suggest Ubuntu? Debates over BSD licence v GPL or whether Nexenta’s GNU/Solaris team are freeloading off Debian are much more interesting to me, although not to that many others — see below.
I don’t even think that the Google-juice is a big part of the equation for bloggers looking for fodder. That may be the case for those looking to make a buck, but for the ones who do it for fun (surely the vast majority of weblogs), it’s the chance to be part of a larger conversation in which you can find a niche. (Or, better to be a small fish in a big pond, etc.) There’s more room for growth if you’re discussing topics of inherently broad interest. At the local level, you really are shouting into space and hoping someone will listen — at least for now. I think this may be different in 2008, but who knows? Broadband’s everywhere in Vancouver, but there’s a large segment of the population who don’t spend huge amounts of time tied to a web browser and like it that way. (They may be the sane ones. Heresy, I know…)
Hey, a lot of other people voted for Jim Green too! Or was that James Green? or Jim Beam? What a travesty. Jim is such a scrapper and to come up short again. Ouchie. Meanwhile, an NPA mayor again who will hopefully be held to task at every move by the four Vision members. I see a healthy future for Vison Vancouver.
Ian – one other little nuance on this whole question of why so little muniblogging: easy third-party validation. I could sound off right now on any number of provincial or federal issues and sound reasonably authoritative, thanks to all the other folks who’ve distilled down factoids and talking points on those issues, from partisans to MSM journalists to academic experts. That isn’t true of many municipal issues.
Evan – I hope you’re right. It’s still a depressing outcome… and James Green has a lot to answer for.
Ross – Oh, we got our wards all right… backwards. (Wah, wah, wah, waaah…) Next question: will we still have Woodwards?
evan–
Ya, it looks we have wards after all.
Except, instead of geographical they look to be ideoLogical(songs?).
.
Need wood?
.
Yeah, the lack of any ready-to-go supporting evidence is one impediment that I hadn’t really considered. There’s no doubt that you have to do your own research at the local level, although that’s easier to do, especially in Vancouver, where much of what council sees is easily available online. At the same time, it brings the activities of the muni-blogger closer to that of a reporter compared to bloggerd going on about national politics.
As for Woody’s:
When I had my hour-long sit-down with Sullivan last month; I did bring up woodward’s with him. What he told me was that he would go along with the project with its expanded scope and city commitment, so that would include the 200 social-housing units and larger residential/office component that council (but not Sullivan) voted up. He gave two reasons: the financial cost of breaking commitments at this stage, and what he called the moral cost that it would incur with investora and businesses. You may see some details changed, like the location of some public facilities or the nature of the child-care spaces.
My sense is that Sullivan’s very cautious and process-oriented nature will compel him to stick with the plans, even those enacted by the previous council. That has been a consistent pattern with Sullivan both before 2002 and since.
Gonna be a fun council to watch.
OK – taking the tack of Ian, I do have a teeny-tiny smidge of inside info on smilin’ Sammy (something you probably know already Ian)…..this comes from a single, unnamed source (but it’s way better than Curveball) and it is this: The staffers, overall, love Mr Sullivan because he actually reads what they give him.