I was writing a comment for (e:zobar,89) and it turned into this entry.

Well, having dealt with the news a bit, it seems that "The News" does not search for what is going on but rather relies on PR directors telling them what the news is. Frankly, I think that is a kind of skewed way of reporting about what is going on but everyone I have talked with that has real media experience says that it is just the way things work. Now that we have a director (e:theecarey) , maybe she can do a little stuffing on our part.

Considering how overwhelming active and alive our comunity is and the fact that we have over 15,000, ~13,000 images and over 3,600,000 views with little or no advertising other than word of mouth - it is amazing that we exist pretty much off the radar. I would say that it is 100% a lack of effective public relations. I have never had any interest in doing it myself.

On the other hand, it has worked well for us in a way, because we have not had much trouble getting enough members to keep to alive and exciting, while avoiding the mainstream myspace/livejournal crowd. I mean we were in the news a couple of times and honetsly, what kind of validation is being in the Buffalo News.

I think being in artvoice would be 1000 times more effective andexciting. It is something I have thought about a lot. Originally, I thought just being hosted by artvoice would make a difference. I am kind of surprised that Jamie Moses wouldn't want to pimp out our existence more to demostrate the benevolence of artvoice. I mean, the service that artvoice provides us, probably makes them the single largest contributor to any non-commerical online public space in Buffalo. If it were me I would brag about my good will ;)

Sometimes I think it is my strict anti-commerical stance that keeps us under the radar. Othertimes, I think it is the fact that we mix news with personal lives and so the outlets that try and emulate the "real news" (including the buffalo news, lol) frown upon that as tabloidesque frivolity.

Then there is the fact that some people try and keep their real lives separate from their journal life because of whatever it is they are confessing. It is a mix of wanting to share and wanting to remain private. As I said in my thesis. It is a combination of wanting to be present and involved while avoiding public scrutiny.

Frankly, we have had one of the most lively community based blogging site that I have seen. Especially for a town of this size. So I say if the news and other media outlets don't notice us without us telling them and shoving it in their face, then they obviously are not attuned to what is going on their city.

Even without being "noticed" today, we will continue to sew the quilt our existence until one day it is so large and old that historians will notice just how fanctastic we really are.

Maybe next year when they have their bloggerCon we should just show up with 100 (e:peeps).

After hours of testing and pretending to be (e:twisted) on her verizon phone I was able to first all fix it so that MMS message that get base64 encoded get decoded when sent to your journal and more importantly - it removes the freakin stupid verizon picture message data at the end of the post.

So go ahead and send MMS from cingular and verizon to your journal using pmobl.

I fixed the wap chat. You can now chat when logged in from any WAP enabled phone. Basically, any phone since 1999. If you aren't logged in you can read the chat. Just visit estrip.org/wap or simply estrip.org on your wap enabled phone.

(e:carolinian) and I went sidewalk chalking on elmwood last night - take pictures if you see it, I forgot.

Tonight we are going to sidewalk (e:paul,771) chalking on elmwood around midnight if enough peeps are interested. I will bring chalk. Who wants to go?

This time we can make it more artistic seeing we don't have to spell out elmwoodstrip.com anymore.

Okay, this effected no one accept me and (e:enknot) but I fixed the flash sound layer that plays mp3 sounds when you upload them into your journal. You can see an example here (e:enknot,32)