The Multnomah Villager

Well, I’ve been long overdue in posting this final post. Partly ’cause I didn’t want to put it out there, but I’m done. Due to some rather unexpected and major life changes, I’ve had to retire the blog. In fact, it gets worse. As of a couple months ago - I have moved out of the Village and am now living in a different part of Portland for the first time since the late ’90s.

I’ll still be around from time to time, since Jr. V is at Maplewood and I’ll be participating in activities with him at school whenever I can.

As for the ‘blog - I really enjoyed keeping it going for the years that it was active, and enjoyed getting to know my neighborhood and its residents in a way that would not have been possible without this site. I’m keeping it online for history’s sake and keeping the domain name. If you’re interested in taking over the site, I might entertain that possibility provided the spirit of the site is maintained and it doesn’t just become a spam-link page.

It’s been great. To quote the dolphins, “Goodbye, and thanks for all the fish.”

So I’m updated to the latest version of Wordpress, which is the engine that drives this ‘blog. Until I have the time to take a look under the hood and re-arrange some things - the blog’s gonna look a little basic. Thanks for your patience.

Thanks to nonprofitgirl for turning me on to a troubling security issue - apparently a bunch of Spam links got into the end of my last post. I went back to the post editor and sure enough, there in the HTML is huge list of Spam links. IN THE CODE. I have no idea how they got there, if they show up at the end of this one, then my Wordpress is compromised, which would be unfortunate. I’ll have to look into this issue a little.

Oh Man! I thought my 2 year anniversary was JULY 25th! Ha ha! I missed it!

OK…. Two years and one month ago today, on Saturday JUNE 25th, 2005 at around 10AM, I posted the first post to this blog.

“Welcome to My Experiment”

It’s certainly been an interesting journey since then. Thanks for all the hits, comments, suggestions compliments and criticisms. This has been fun, and continues to be an exciting challenge. I might change things up over the next year. I’m probably going to redesign again, I’m thinking of adding additional writers (you out there, Cate?) and well, we’ll see what else comes down the road.

I resisted the temptation to add a PayPal “Buy me a coffee/beer” button on this post, as a blatant anniversary exploit, but since I can’t even remember when the darned anniversary is……  I’m like Fred Flintstone over here! To think I’ve been holding off on this post, to wait for the exact day!

I’m thinking of doing a Villager meetup at Journey’s later this summer or in September, I’ll hold off on my trolling for free beers until then.

So I’ve been thinking about integrating a calendar feature for a little while now, but haven’t done so because of the work invovled with gathering information and keeping it updated. So I was happy to discover that the Multnomah Village Business Association has done the work for me! Well, for us. I’ll be adding a sidebar link to this, but for now..

The MVBA Multnomah Village Events Calendar is here.

So I’ve decided to go down to San Francisco on the 21st and 22nd to Attend WordCamp, which is a gathering/conference of WordPress bloggers and programmers. It’ll be a totally nerdly time, which is pretty much what I’m in the mood for. After tabbing too quickly through the registration form and thwarting the auto-form-complete thing which has me totally spoiled, I realized that I had tabbed down too quick and registered with an incomplete last name, so I’ll be attending as “Mark My”. I’ll have to write the “ers” in by hand I suppose. Nothing says “geek” like a misspelled nametag.

Since I registered this afternoon, I’ve been getting several hits from the WordCamp attendee list (Web 2.0 types love “camel case”). For those of you coming here and expecting to find a tech blog… surprise! This site is totally iPhone free. This blog is pretty much purely about how cool my little neighborhood in Portland Oregon is, and the day-to-day of living here.

Come visit for real sometime. I’ll see you in a few weeks.

Don’t get too excited, it’s just me.

Hi, I’m Mark Myers, and yes, I write the Villager ‘blog. Several people have been after me to “come out” recently, and my latest column the Post was published under my actual name, so I guess I better pull back the curtain on this thing, eh? When I started writing this blog, I thought it’d be easier for me to do it under a pen name, as I didn’t really want to put myself out there until I was sure I’d be able to keep up with maintaining a “real” blog, and I wasn’t sure if people would read. Plus, I like the idea of being able to just go places in the Village as just another Villager, and not as “that guy who writes the blog”, which is why I’m still going to be pretty low key about my “secret identity”.

My wife Parni, and our son Max and I live right on 35th and we’ve been here since I think 1997. Parni and I rented a house over on 41st and Iowa for a year or so before we bought our place here. Max just finished his first year of school at Maplewood and is VERY EXCITED about being a first grader.

Back to our regular programming….

I have been on the road for the last week. We took Jr. V to Disneyland as a surprise last weekend, and while I was there I caught something that has turned into a double ear infection and a nasty cold. Considering I’ve been on five planes in the last seven days, this has not made for a very productive week. I’ll resume blogging when I come back to life, which hopefully will be sometime this weekend.

Neighbor Kathy, quickly becoming a regular correspondent, passes along a tip this morning about a story on NPR about an Icelandic publishing company (Dagsbrun, at Wikipedia) that is launching free papers in 10 US cities incorporating content from local bloggers. This growing intersection between blogs and “traditional” media has been an ongoing conversation for me for a while. Hillsdale activist Rick Siefert, of the Red Electric and I had a discussion on this subject at Village Coffee several months ago, as he laid out his plans for a more traditional reporting approach to neighborhood blogging, as opposed to my “hey, check out this cool place” school of journalism.

I can’t get a clean stream of this story, so I don’t know if Portland is included in Dagsbrun’s plans - I’ll update as soon as I can listen to this. Thanks, Kathy!

EDIT: Here’s a link to this story on WBUR (Boston) that includes a transcript. It’s their story, NPR picked it up for the national newscast.

Here’s the link to the story on NPR.org, although be warned - their streaming servers are performing very poorly this morning, likely due to the horrible events at VA Tech yesterday. I graduated from high school in Virginia, and a lot of my friends went to Tech, I’m pretty sure that at least one member of my high school circle teaches there. I’ve been to the dorm they’re talking about - I just can’t imagine…

There’s a difference between writitng for a paper or magazine, and being a blogger. The easiest thing to point at is the fact that I can publish whenever I want, as quickly as I want, as a blogger. I don’t have to wait a week or more to “get it out there”, which is useful from a discussion standpoint. I’m also not accountable to editors, advertisers, etc. Oh yes, the people who know me in real life might say a word or two about something I’ve written, but that’s it. Of course, I’m not exactly doing hard-hitting investigative journalism here, so there’s a minimum of rsik of a brick through the window and all that.

A few things have happened in the past couple of weeks that have got me thinking about this odd hobby of mine, and how it relates to other published resources in and about our community.

• I’ve gotten a few comments and quiet emails from readers of this blog who were NOT mentioned in the recent SW Community Connection story on women-owned businesses in the Village - going to show that you always have choices to make when you publish a story, especially a cover story, and no matter what you do, some people will be upset, ’cause you can’t include everybody. That said, one of my commenters mentioned that a published list of the women-owned or women-operated businesses in the Village (inlcuding the ones that were NOT featured) would have been a nice addition.
• My friend Janna has gone from a columnist to a blogger to a columnist/blogger to publisher of Portland Family magazine. Congratulations Janna!
• I got an email on Saturday from Don Snedecor, publisher of the Multnomah Village Post, asking if I would be interested in writing a column in the Post. Lately, Don’s been taking some heat for his story content, and his focus on “crappy local businesses” (a complaint which certainly applies to this blog as well) and Don’s under the impression that the mysterious and dashing “Villager” will do something towards diversifying his content mix, I guess.
• I’ve lived through a minor comment war on the ratio of paid- versus non-paid-placement mentions in the Portland Picks newsletter.

So I said “yes” to Don, and I guess there will be “Multnomah Villager” column in The Post starting with the next issue!
Now if I could just figure out something to write about - now THAT’S a universal journalistic dilemma!