BCR: Limited posts this week, and a question

A note to readers: I'm traveling this week (4/22-4/28) on vacation, so updates may be a bit more sporadic than usual. I'm visiting family in my hometown and least-favorite Southern city, Orlando. New items appear below this post.

In the interim, I'm curious for feedback on what folks might like to see as expanded (or reduced) topics for coverage at BCR, especially as the number of readers grow. Are there things happening in Durham you'd like to read about here... or things you'd never want to see covered again? Please feel free to use the Comments section on this page, or email me your thoughts.

Comments

[barry]

kevin - i'm not sure that i'd like to see you alter your vision by taking audience requests. one of the things about blogs that works best (IMO) is the presentation of individual perspective.

your choices about what to cover, and how to cover it, are what you bring to the table, as are Gary's, Michael's, Pam's, even Blazer Manpurse's.

do any of us, singly or even in the greater whole, present a complete picture of Durham? of course not. but i don't think it's our responsibility or obligation to do that.

[Dave S.]

Kevin, I disagree with Barry. I think you need to be including more pics with bull feces photoshopped in.

Just kidding. I actually use my handy Firefox extensions to block Bullshat's logo.

Your blog is great as it is, and keep up the terrific work! Hope you're having a good vacation!

[Dave S.]

Actually, one suggestion...if a more user-friendly comment-verification widget exists for Typepad, that would be great. I'm really bad at passing the black-on-grey-spotted-background-with-criss-crossing-lines test.

See you back at "Ambacco" (or TriBaco) next week!

[Bull City Rising]

Barry: Just to be clear, I certainly am not looking to try to present a complete vision of Durham. Truth is, I find I run across three times as many things of interest to me as I actually post... which is somewhat a factor of time, somewhat a factor of wanting to keep the blogging to a reasonable roar. :)

I guess what I was trying, inarticulately, to get at is that there are two types of things I post to BCR:

* Topics that really interest me personally a great deal, like discussion of development and growth, politics/government, and the local media. Those posts aren't going to change; that's the most personal part of my blogging and the part I love most about writing here.

* Topics about "what's happening" in Durham generally, which is part of my reason for blogging here in the first place. In '04 when my wife was coming down to Duke for law school, we could find terribly little (good, useful) info about the Bull City on the web. Certainly I can tell from referring URLs from search engines that lots of folks get directed here looking for info on new restaurants in the area, stores, events, neighborhoods, etc.

It's really the latter category I'm more curious about. One of the other things I struggle with, to that end, is how useful it is to have news about business changes (like new restaurants and shopping, etc.) that get announced in the N&O and Herald-Sun. On the one hand, I suspect most regular readers read these publications, too, and it's silly to just re-include. At the same time, there's value in being able to just scroll through a category like "Food & Drinks" and look back on what's happened over a period of time. (I need to add a link to the Durham Foodie blog, which *really* has good discussions on some of this and more.)

Ditto with events. For a while I was including info on upcoming events like Culture Crawl. On the other hand... is it just an echo chamber to do so, since they're usually covered on the ABCD list and elsewhere? I've shied away from those because they are more time-sensitive and aren't always as interesting or relevant in the long run.

So I guess my real question is, how valuable and useful is it to folks who read the blog to have some of those "re-published" items? These don't take long to post and I like to try to tie in back-stories where possible (like the Steve Matherly discussion around the Five Points Cafe after a reader noted the link), but if these are just re-hash to 95% of folks coming here, then I might not take the time to post those.

One question might be, why publish those items at all if they're as strong personal passions as the first set of topics? Part of my goal in writing BCR is providing coverage in one place of what's going on in Durham as both a record/archive and as news for some, potentially. But if it's really not valuable for those reasons, I would probably focus more on the first category.

Thanks for the comment -- this is helpful to me in trying to sort through some of these 'direction' questions in my own mind.

Dave: Do I gotta come back? :) It's actually been a working vacation, helping one of my parents pack up their house in the Mouse House city. But a nice break nonetheless. Still: after dealing with congestion, conspicuous overconsumption, and rude people in my now-disliked hometown, it'll be good to come back to my real home.

[barry]

as a general rule, i scan the N&O Durham headlines 3 or 4 mornings a week. i almost never read the TBJ or other similar publications unless someone forwards me an article. i'll often pick up the Saturday morning durham News (from the N&O), because otherwise it turns into a pulpy mess at the end of the driveway. I usually pickup the Indy every week to get a sense of what shows and movies and i'm going to miss. Since the H-S went to registration, i've only stopped by once. Yeah, i know about Bug-Me-Not, i just don't see enough useful info there to go through the trouble.

so i appreciate getting a lot of the inside scoop here on who's doing what biz and real estate wise. especially since you know and share a lot of behind the scenes details on who owns what, and what the hidden links are between the different players. i assume you write about that stuff because it truly interests you. at least that's how it comes across.

as far as event announcement type stuff, well, i'mm on pretty much every listserv in town. this morning alone i received 5 announcements from John Schelp about tomorrow's urban hike through Hayti and Fayetteville St. So, from my perspective, that's not what i'm looking for. But if you want to put that stuff in the blog, then certainly go for it.