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WHERE ARE THE BLOGS? - (4#) -
Networking From England to SoFlo -

England is an older society than ours; and the English seem to have a talent for organizing themselves, as this article in a recent edition of the UK Guardian illustrates:

"Mapping Britain's blogosphere: As blogging becomes a national pastime, Guy Clapperton takes a look at some of the writers who have embraced the medium to promote the cities they live in."

Closer to home, in the aftermath of Stuck on the Palmetto (SOTP) closing down, there has been some speculation that Critical Miami might be its successor, but I don't think that prospect looks very good. SOTP was at least nominally located in Pembroke Pines which is just over the Dade line in Broward County, forming a sort of bridge between Dade and Broward. And, although the Miami bloggers are noisy, the SoFlo blogging scene actually stretches from south of Miami in the Florida Keys up to Palm Beach. The problem is: South Florida is a lot more than just Miami.

Like a now-phantom amputated limb, SOTP continues to reverberate in the SoFlo Blogosphere. Perhaps that's because it still constitutes some sort of focal point even while defunct.

Carlos Miller continues to churn out pulplike Apocrypha about it, some of which is quite entertaining, including the spinoff parodies discussing the issue. His latest chapter is: Stripped of the Palmetto - Episode IV.

Doesn't noisy Miami have its own aggregator? Isn't anyone keeping tabs on the SoFlo Blogging Scene?

A Communications professor at the University of Miami keeps tabs on it. And Prof Alex recently partitioned his virtual machinery to establish a new blog called Stone Soup. Somehow, he manages to keep up with the latest developments using RSS, I believe, to stay current.

I don't know of any aggregator for Miami; SOTP was the closest to it. Their sidebar links were set to float blogs with new entries to the top of the list.

That leaves the South Florida Blogging Scene still in disarray. Unlike our English cousins who seem to have an amazing ability to organize for High Tea in the jungle or to organize blogging networks even in obscure neighborhoods we've never heard of.

As one SoFlo Blogger recently put it: the end of SOTP mean that the rest of us need to step up our game. And maybe more readers of blogs need to become bloggers themselves...

+ typos corrected: mon/dec24/1:20pm/xxx.

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