Making Her Voice Heard

Here's a portion of the letter we received from McKenzie Ditter, whose family owns Bun Penny. She gave us permission to reprint:

The Bun Penny market and cafe has been a part of the Columbia Mall for nearly forty years, and my family has owned it for the past eighteen. We have always struggled to survive in the mall, but after General Growth Properties' acquisition of the Rouse Company, it has become impossible. The day before this Thanksgiving, my father was notified that Bun Penny must leave the mall by January 15th. Just as they decided that Columbia no longer needed the Poinsettia Tree, they have decided that Bun Penny no longer has a place in the Columbia Mall.

Until now, my family has kept news of our closure a secret from customers and employees for fear of jeopardizing the final shipments from our food distributors. Now, with Christmas passed, I think it is safe to spread the word. I'd like Columbia to recognize the plight of small businesses in the profit-before-people culture fostered by companies like GGP. I want people to see how far the new owners of Columbia are straying from James Rouse's initial vision. My family has been struggling to pay an ever-increasing rent of $38,000 a month to a company based in Chicago that shows little to no regard for the traditions and institutions of Columbia.

I don't know what the future holds for Bun Penny, but knowing that it will no longer be a part of the mall is sad. As much as I dislike the superficiality of what the mall has become, it's hard to forget that it has been a second home to my father, mother, brother and me for as long as I can remember. As a little girl, I played in the straw barrels that we used for gift baskets. I threw temper-tantrums in front of customers, had countless crushes on cute deli boys twice my age, and broke more bottles of wine than I can remember. I collected coffee beans from the ground, made sandwich signs and window murals, sewed tablecloths, and catered the beautiful weddings of some of Columbia's most powerful residents. I can make a gift basket with my eyes closed and recite the prices of hundreds of cracker boxes and jellies and teas in my sleep. For better or worse, Bun Penny has been an extremely important part of my life, and I know I am not alone.

Bun Penny is a family business - not just my immediate family, but the extended family of employees, customers, and even old Harry the produce man. There are men and women working at this store who have known me since before I was born. The Bun Penny family has seen births, teenage romances, graduations, marriages, divorces, and deaths. Through it all, there has always been love and support for anyone in need. This family deserves to know how much they are worth and how much they have meant to us. This is not the first time that a family business has been driven out of the Columbia Mall and it does not bode well for the few that remain. Considering the Poinsettia Tree debacle, tradition appears to be a tender topic during the holidays and GGP's continued efforts to undermine such traditions should not go unnoticed. If Columbia wants to preserve its other institutions, it must continue to make its voice heard.

McKenzie Ditter

WaPo Launches Local Blog Directory

This one caught me by surprise. The Washington Post is creating a directory of local blogs. You can list yours here. Hopefully, this will help more people discover our blogs. Before the folks at the Post's Web site embarked on this project, they had a little summit with area bloggers to get their thoughts. Most people seemed pretty enthusiastic about the idea; anything that drives traffic is good, right? The home page lists hot topics and shows a sample of recent postings. There are also "picks," though I don't know who does the picking. The site also offers some Post widgets you can add to your blog to get a feed of certain content, like the politics blog The Fix (thus letting you embed a blog in a blog!). Finally, there are a few resources, such as a link to the Electronic Frontier Foundation's legal guide for bloggers.

Blogger Buzz

Here's a new feature in Google's Blogger software that has Facebook-like appeal:

Browse Profiles! Find new blogs to read!
Say you live in Albuquerque, count the Smashing Pumpkins among your favorite bands, and like sushi. Starting today, we’re making it easy for you to find other bloggers who share your interests.

Now you can go to any Blogger profile page (start with your own, or perhaps another popular blogger’s) and follow any of the links on the page to get a list of other bloggers with the same industry, occupation, location, interest, or favorite book, movie, or music.

What if you could "friend" bloggers of likemindedness?

Vacation

The blogger's lament. I had the best of intentions but just could not bring myself to blog much over the past three weeks, two of which have been spent away on vacation. We spent one at Myrtle Beach watching our son play a baseball tourney and the other at Lake Powell in Arizonia (the pic is of Rainbow Bridge, a mile hike from the lake). This being my first blogging summer, I realize I'll have to come up with some way to feed my personal blogs while away; at the office, at least there was plenty of help (although I see a few things didn't get updated while I was away!)

Blog Heaven

WaPo's business staff just launched two more blogs, one called Small Business on washingtonpost.com and one on government contracting dubbed Government Inc. That brings to five the number of active bizzy blogs on the site, with tech guru Rob Pegoraro's popular Faster Forward and the tech staff's Post I.T. effort in the mix.

This is all part of the newspaper's effort to experiment with all sorts of online content. Over time, I'd like to distinquish the WashBiz Blog from the cookie-cutter blog template we are using since it is not really a blog in the classic sense. It's a more a newsy roundup. Which may mean we need to tinker with the name :)

Any ideas?

Our consumer blog and a jobs blog are on hiatus as the women who wrote them are currently on maternity leave. That raises another interesting issue...how to sustain these things when people are away. Or does that matter? My personal belief is that it is important to be consistent so readers have some expectation about what they are getting and can make reading the sites part of their routines. But, that said, perhaps online readers can be a forgiving bunch as long as they understand why things slow down.

What do you think?

Thinking About Multi-Media

How to measure success on the Web? It sounds like some folks are getting ready to change the definition. Nielsen NetRatings says it will scrap ratings based on page views in favor of time spent on a site. This is a nod to the YouTubes of the world, where people spent a lot of time watching video but don't necessarily flip through as many Web pages.

However, the story says the change hurts Google some because it sends people to other pages and helps AOL, which gets credit for instant message use.

Serving Readers, With A Side Of Promo

The WashBiz Blog is off and running and the initial response has been good, though I know you critics are out there ;). I started off with just a news-headlines approach to provide a base for the thing, but a few of our staff writers have begun to see how we can use the site to complement the stories we do in the paper, and get in print some of the stuff they know but which really isn't a fully formed story --- yet.

I've been spending some time each day attempting to hoover up all sites that supply local economic data around the region. As you can imagine, the data that is available is very uneven from county to county. Getting this all in one place should be a community service.

And that's what the blog is supposed to be---not a vanity project but a service to readers. Of course, part of that service is to tell readers all the good stuff in WaPo each day. So when it seems appropriate, I'll point to bizzy-related stories in other sections as a navigation aid to readers online and off.

The WashBiz Blog Is Ready To Launch

We're going public Monday. You'll be able to find my new baby at washingtonpost.com/washbizblog. It's a fairly spartan affair but it'll evolve over time as we see what works and doesn't.

We gave up on building a news feed for now. Automating the thing never yielded the results we were after. It seems human intervention remains important in selecting relevant local news. As an alternative, we're just going to link to the various business pages on the Web site (which each have their own human overseers) and work with the category listings in the archives.

I'm hoping the WashBiz blog leads to a whole new level of reader and company engagement. We'll post whatever we feel like, whether it's a breaking news bit, a blog excerpt, or a link to an important document. The ambition here is to give readers a one-stop place for local business news. The great thing about the Web is that, unlike the confines of newsprint, there is seemingly an infinite amount of real estate to play with.

If only there was an infinite amount of time.

Cause and Effect

It didn't seem so long ago that I had all these balls in the air and life was good. We're getting ever so closer to debuting the WashBiz Blog but there are still some wrinkles to iron out. WaPo's newspaper and Web operations are separate entities, which requires multiple layers of involvement to get something like this launched.

Obviously, we work very closely with one another on a daily basis but whenever it's time to break templates or try something new there can be a chain reaction of causes and effects.

That's what we're working through right now. The progress might be a bit slower than I expected but I'm learning a whole lot about how the Web version of the newspaper works, and about the business of building a proper blog ;).

It's interesting to me to compare the process to the completely unencumbered task of getting Columbia Talk up and running. I'll be curious to see how the two evolve over time.

WashBiz Blog

Over at WaPo, we're chugging along at building what we are calling the "WashBiz Blog." I'm getting into the routine of blogging daily about local happenings but the work is not visible yet, largely because the template is under construction.

Patience, I keep telling myself.

One of the trickier pieces is getting a feed built that will import local business headlines from the daily paper. Teaching a computer what a local business story is can be a challenge, but we have some smart cookies on the online side who are figuring it out.

I'm hoping to use the blog to supplement the news we deliver in the paper. We won't be shy about pointing to the work of other news media. We hope to experiment with multi-media over time.

The idea is to give our readers as complete a shot at daily events as possible. How one navigates through all that information is something we'll be finetuning in the weeks and months to come.

A New Blog

Since you guys are the cool kids, I'll let you in on a little secret. Later this week, I'll be launching a local business blog at WaPo. It'll be a work in progress, like everything else I'm doing, and we'll be taking baby steps at first. The concept initially is to make the blog a home for local business headlines, served up in a chatty way. Over time, we'll add in other features, such as streaming chats, podcasts and whatever else we can dream up. The goal is to create a site that reflects the region's business sensibilities, something that doesn't really exist anywhere on the Web yet, as far as I can tell. Of course, if you know different let me know. And once we are up and running please send me feedback; it can only get better if people tell me what's wrong.

Facebook v. Face Time

No sooner had I written yesterday's post than I logged on to my Facebook page and found an invitation from an old colleague to be his "friend." There on his page was a link to his wife's new cookbook Web site, www.loulies.com, something I might never have discovered had I not dipped my toe into this social networking stuff. Score one for the online world

Face Time v. Facebook

We had a luncheon at the Post yesterday for top execs at Post 200 companies, and the conversation around the table was very stimulating. The event was a reminder to me that as powerful as Facebook and other social networking software can be, there's no real substitute for human interaction.

My Podcast Commute

I'm often asked by my co-workers how I can possibly stand my daily commute to Washington. Well, for starters, I tell them, I cheat. My day begins a little later than most people's and it ends later, so I typically miss the worst of the daily traffic mess. And I don't hurry; I get in a lane and stay there. It relieves some of the aggravation of "fighting" traffic.

But my real secret is my radio. I installed a fancy one that not only allows me to subscribe to XM satellite service but has an iPod hookup. Each day I load my iPod with all manner of content and it helps pass the time quite nicely. I listen to NPR shows and Harvard business school broadcasts, music roundups and tech talk, even a recording of the daily announcements at my son's high school (boy, does that take me back!) The iPod allows me to listen to shows when I want and pause them when I reach my destination.

Local content is harder to come by. But I keep searching. Anyone have a favorite?

Facebook Generations

Here's a funny piece from the NY Times about a mom getting on Facebook to the horror of her daughter. My boys are not on Facebook, or so they say :), but they have confirmed for me that my wife and I have no business invading their world!

For me, this is just more evidence of the need to bridge the offline and online worlds---too often these places seems like parallel universes, never intersecting.

Oral History on Podcasts

I sent an e-mail over to Barbara Kellner at the Columbia Archives inquiring whether it would be possible to put the local remembrances she is collecting on the Internet as a podcast.

I just made a quick pass, but it does not appear that much of the center's material, if any, is available online, but of course I may be missing something. The archives has an absolute treasure trove of information about the town. Wouldn't that be a fun project, putting the archives on the Internet, accessible to a search engine?

Ah, so many projects, so little time.

A Council Blogcast

I spent four years as a reporter for The Washington Post covering Howard County in the early 1990s and passed many a loooong night at council meetings and other government confabs. They can be tedious but strangely addicting. I've steered clear of a lot of politics and policy so far in the Columbia Talk blog because I just don't feel as informed as I once was.

But I've got this idea jangling around my head.

Council sessions and school board meetings are televised, right? What if instead of yelling at the TV in the quiet of our own homes we created an online chat room to comment on the festivities in real time. Would that be a net positive for democracy or not?

Should there be some rules of the road for participating?

What software would be useful?

I'm willing to play host for a time or two to get things off and running if anyone thinks this might be worth a try.

It certainly feels like this might produce some fresh fodder for the blogosphere.

Worth Watching

Adrian Holovaty was a database and programming genius at The Post. We never met directly but he recently pulled my butt out of the fire on our annual Post 200 section, working some last minute magic to get it up on the Web. He recently announced he was leaving the paper after receiving a $1+ million grant to build some kind of new local news aggregator. The details on his Web site so far are intriguing, if thin:


EveryBlock
EveryBlock will be a Web site that aggregates an unprecedented depth of local news and information in select cities.
E-mail Adrian at info at everyblock.com if you'd like to be notified when we have something to show. If you'd like, let us know your hometown and which types of local news you might want to see.
Thanks for your interest!
— Adrian, Wilson and Paul

BTW, did anyone has trouble accessing Google this morning, or was it just me?

In Search Of...Local Business Blogs

As someone who works in the media, it is becoming increasingly evident to me that there is often two different conversations going on about the world around us. The off line one, in newspapers, television, radio, magazines and such, and the online one.

As local business editor, I'm pretty comfortable with off-line business news. But the online world is still foreign territory. Soooo, I am interested in assembling a blog roll of folks who write about business in the greater Washington area. I'm interested in all sorts of online commentary: company blogs, CEO blogs, worker bee blogs, economic analysis, stock tips on local companies, etc. If you have a favorite, or you compile one, please drop me a line.

I hope to make a home for these links on the washingtonpost.com Web site, and find ways to allow these online conversations to make their way into the daily paper.

Bike Map Photos

If I understand this software you can upload photos to correspond with points on the map. This weekend I hope to head out for a pic or two of tunnels and other trail places of interest. Feel free to upload snaps of your own favorite spot....

We're Not Alone

WaPo's media writer Howard Kurtz joined Facebook and seems as befuddled as the rest of us old timers. He describes his experience (30 years after last pulling on a pair of bellbottoms) and concludes that much of it is the online equivalent of just hanging out.

Facebook could have power if people use it to regularly update their activities, because of the way its news feed works, alerting you to what your "friends" are up to. I found a way to import my blog feed but for some reason my page is posting everything twice (argh! did I hit the import button twice, how do you undo that?)

The question then becomes...how many online things do we all want to update regularly? For anything to work well you have to put energy into it.

Bike Map Display Issues

I don't know about you but for some reason the "map" under the bike paths doesn't show for me when I load the page. If I click on the map it takes me to Wayfaring and then if I click on satellite view, and back to maps, I get the image in its full glory. This might be a bug in Wayfaring's software, and as you can see there's not a lot of support links there yet. Welcome to the world of early adopting...Anyway, I'm moving forward.

There are other ways to skin this cat. Howard County has data for building this map the right way (that's how the paper maps were generated) and I am pursuing that avenue as well. I probably will proceed on parallel tracks.

The goal is to make something freely available to anyone who wants it.

Help Me Build A Bike Map

There was discussion on the local blogs the other day about building an online version of the Columbia bike map. I decided to give it a whirl. I'm trying out free software at Wayfaring.com. It's obviously still in beta form but it offers some interesting possibilities: such as allowing folks to post photos of interesting spots, snow cone stands, tot lots and the like. It appears that building this map is going to be a time-consuming process. But I think it will be a local hit. Does anyone want to help?

Here's my feeble start; give it time to load:

Joining Facebook

I have joined Facebook after a curious confluence of events. First, I met a fellow HoCo blogger named Jesse Newburn, who in the midst of our conversation said something like "You should get on Facebook." Then the folks at WaPo announced the company was putting together a little politics app for the network. Here's a link to an explanation of how it works.

At first I didn't get Facebook at all. I could hardly figure out how to navigate the thing. But as I add "friends" and see all their updates I'm beginning to grasp the power. I'd love thoughts from users about how to integrate Facebook with what I'm doing at Columbia Talk. Please send me your success stories.