ATHENSi.com has been around since early 2001, making it one of the older web-only services in Athens, Ohio. If you are reading this, you probably already value ATHENSi.com's aggregating service, or some other aspect of the site.
For the record, ATHENSi.com is a community service of the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism. We created it as an outlet for journalism students learning about new media. With the cooperation of many, many local news media entities, we quickly added RSS feeds from every local new source we could think of, creating a portal aggregating service that makes ATHENSi.com a terrific starting point when you want to see what's going on in Athens, Ohio.
I should also admit before going further that I run site. And if a bus were to run me over on my way home, the site would keep on running for a while (because of the magic of rss), but if and when it were to break, I doubt very much that anyone could begin to figure out how to fix it. Maybe that's why I'm starting up this blog... to create a kind of "paper" trail. Toward that end, this blog is my way to bring more transparency to the production of the site. Strange that it's taken me so long to start this blog, given that I teach transparency to anyone who'll listen!
In fact, I set this blog up back in December, but immediately forgot about it, which I suppose means I wasn't thinking very seriously about it when I established it. I was a little surprised to stumble on it earlier this week while preparing for an... you got it... online journalism class. As soon as I saw the blog title I realized I had been remiss in NOT having set up such a blog a long time ago. Yes, I do have a little blurb under the site's FAQ section explaining a bit about the site. And yes, I do get an occasional email related to ATHENSi.com ... usually someone wanting coverage for an event, or a business or agency wanting to be linked from the site. I always try to figure out how to accommodate such requests. But I don't go out of my way to solicit such emails, and for that I'm embarrassed. Chagrined. I admit it, it's my bad. My only excuse: I was too busy playing guitar on my front porch, enjoying walks with my wife and our dogs on the Near East side of town, in other words, just kickin' back.
I'd like to think that ATHENSi.com can serve a more important role than being the occasional diversion, or convenient way to aggregate news in a portal-type site. In fact, with our web publishing technology -- which I'll write about in another blog post if anyone wants to know about it -- we can create the community bulletin board that folks say the Web should become in local communities. In fact, it really is up to you... citizens of Athens, Ohio, whether you want to have such a bulletin board, town square, public sphere, etc. in the entity of ATHENSi.com. Let me know if you want to start speaking out through the ATHENSi.com bullhorn, and I'll tell how it can be done.
Oh yeah, one more thing... The preferred "style" for referencing the site is ATHENSi.com. Not athensi.com. And certainly not Athensi.com. Just so you know.
Bob Stewart (robertkstewart@hotmail.com)
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