Debra Galant Explains the Universe: On the internet, nobody knows you're in Mahwah

If you live in New Jersey (and who doesn't?) pick up a copy of today's New York Times and look for my story on Jersey bloggers. It's on page 2 of the Jersey section, and it includes some of our favorite local bloggers: Tom Biro, Lizbeth Finn-Arnold, Robert Recchia, The Soup Lady and Jeff Jarvis.

I wish I could have included The Prop, whose blog is now a daily read, but he wanted to keep his identity secret. OK, fine. Your secret's safe with me. I send you readers anyway.

I'd also like to send my readers over to Eszter Hargittai at Crooked Timber. She's a bona fide Ph.D. sociologist who studies weblogs and who has excellent Jersey credentials (the doctorate was from Princeton). She took the time to do an e-mail interview with me from Budapest last week, but here wise words were cut to make room for a New York Times house ad. Sorry, Eszter.

For reasons we don't understand, you can get everything else in today's New York Times online, except for the Jersey section. They don't post Jersey stories on the website until a week or two later - and then you have to pay for them.

So here's what it said:

On the Internet, Nobody Knows You're in Mahwah

By Debra Galant

SOUTH ORANGE
LATE on a snowy St. Patrick’s Day, eight people sat around a table at the Dancing Goat Café here, not getting drunk or singing Irish ditties. The beverage of choice was coffee, and they were talking about things like how often they check their Technorati numbers. These people are all New Jersey bloggers: They all keep Weblogs, or online journals.

Face-to-face meetings are sooooo 20th century, and not surprisingly the bloggers seemed a little uncomfortable, perched on cushions and shouting to be heard above live music. They’re more used to meeting in cyberspace, where they can write cleverly without having to make eye contact.

But the gathering in South Orange was organized by nj.com, the online home to nine New Jersey newspapers and a big promoter of Weblogs in the Garden State. The awkwardness faded, laptops emerged, and within about an hour of the meeting’s end, three bloggers there had written about the event one of them, Tom Biro (www.themediadrop.com), even posting a picture. “We all figured out that we’re very into blogging as a whole,” he wrote. “Gee, I couldn’t tell.”

In the real world - oops, the physical world - communities are formed in schoolyards, at churches, bars and book clubs, and over the water cooler at offices. But in the blogosophere, where bloggers meet, communities can transcend geography altogether. Gadget-lovers from Florida to Alaska discuss cell phone features.

Even so, when the subject is local, there is still a little geography involved. New Jersey bloggers, even when not meeting in person, do reassert their roots in cyberspace.

“Our emphasis on nj.com is local,” said Dean Betz, editor in chief of the site and its chief Weblog recruiter. “We can’t really get local enough.” In addition to Weblogs about the Sopranos (pro and con) and on Bruce Springsteen, nj.com now features 13 Weblogs focused on the goings-on in specific towns. The newest, Bloomfield Journal, was started by Mr. Biro, who was recruited at the Dancing Goat Café meeting.
Then there’s the Transit Blog (www.nj.com/weblogs/transit), also on nj.com. There, commuters can whine about all things transit, from fears of a Madridlike bombing to the “curse of the middle seat.”

Nobody knows how many New Jersey bloggers there are, because on the Internet, nobody knows you’re from Mahwah. But it’s not hard at all to find bloggers who admit hailing from the Garden State.

First of all, there’s a New Jersey bloggers “net ring,” which now lists 74 active sites. Members of the ring post this code on their sites, which allows readers to leap effortlessly from one state blog to the next.

Lizbeth Finn-Arnold, a filmmaker in Aberdeen, has a Weblog called Mom and Pop Culture (http://travelswithlizbeth.typepad.com). She started blogging to find mothers sharpe-tongued than those she was finding in the physical world. "Motherhood is about not being honest," she explained, adding, "I had to talk about things other than dirty diapers."

Like most bloggers, Ms. Finn-Arnold has developed her online community by listing other mom bloggers on her “blogroll,” a feature that allows readers to link easily to online pals. Such links are recorded by Technorati, which tracks 256 million links among 1.9 million bloggers. (By the way, Technorati says that 11,000 new blogs are started every day.)

Curiously, a popular cybercommunity fixated on the subject of soup also originates in Aberdeen. There a nurse named Susan Rizkalla, aka the Soup Lady, writes “The Joy of Soup” (http://joyofsoup.com).
Ms. Rizkalla is a nurse, not a cook, but started the blog because she likes to eat a robust cabbage soup when the weather gets cold. Before long, she started using the blog as a way to reminisce and comment about things from Jell-O to hospitality.

Other blogs are more specifically Jersey-centric. Over at a Weblog called “Garden Status” (www.gardenstate.blogspot.com), a former journalist named Robert Recchia regularly scours New Jersey newspapers for interesting articles and adds his commentary. Recently he praised NJ Transit for a radio ad that pronounced Secaucus the way natives do. “It’s SEE-caw-cus (not see-CAW-cus as it’s always pronounced by the New York media).”

Blogs certainly got a jolt of adrenaline after Sept. 11, which is when Jeff Jarvis, president of Advance.net, publisher of www.nj.com, began his blog. “It quickly expanded to fill available life,” he said.
Mr. Jarvis’s Weblog, now called BuzzMachine (www.buzzmachine.com), is one of the most frequently linked blogs on the Internet (1,672 sites link to it, according to Technorati). Mr. Jarvis has become a major voice in the debate over the Federal Communications Commission and Howard Stern.

On March 18, Mr. Jarvis proved that one person can simultaneously take action in two communities.He blogged about Mr. Stern’s $27,500 fine - while sitting in a church.

Debra Galant Explains the Universe

On the internet, nobody knows you're in Mahwah

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