One Utah

Deseret Morning News reporter Kersten Swinyard interviewed me for today’s article Blogger’s mellow; his site’s got sass about Ethan’s www.slcspin.com.

The article and Ethan accurately point out that “When you start a blog, you should be ready for it to be just you.”

That statment is more true than I’d like to admit. I started OneUtah because I was encouraged to do so by others who agreed to contribute. I don’t see a great deal of civic value in one person blogs, and when Ethan began attacking me during and after Janneke’s campaign (he has since tendered an olive branch), I refused to engage on his blog as I told Kersten, “Somebody else’s blog is not a great place to have a political battle.”

When I challenged him to allow me to top post, he refused, and I stopped reading SLCspin. That was back in November 2005.

Then one day during the Christmas holidays, I went there and discovered Ethan had written a post about me that very day, something like “Progressive Re-defined”. I was shocked. So I searched SLCspin for my name, and was further surprised to find that there has been running conversation about me of which I had been completely unaware. I have yet to understand what that was about. I guess when you stick your neck out, even if only to do good things, you should expect someone to take a wack at you.

That experience shaped OneUtah. I think there is great value in having multiple contributors ala www.huffingtonpost.com www.and Dailkos.com with a geocentric audience. As I said early on,

I just want it to be like it was in the olden days. When there was a wise person in every tribe or village. And everybody knew who it was because they could see them and know them.

And everybody listened to them because they were good people, even the powerful leaders, or they would lose their power.

I’d love to see OneUtah become a place to hear those voices. I’m still waiting, but I’m not giving up.

In the meantime, I will top post just about anything anyone sends me.

PS: OneUtah’s traffic has exceeded 5000 unique visitors/day several times.

This entry was posted Monday, April 24th, 2006 at 12:39 pm and is filed under This Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.