Blogging Georgetown is not my idea of a typical blog. Why? Because it is useful. John P. consistently delivers passionate, yet thoughtful and well-written advocacy that not just informs his neighborhood, but the surrounding city as well. I may have only been to Georgetown once, but I still read Blogging Georgetown frequently and was more than pleased to be able to interview its author for this tournament.

It was just about this time last year that you were making the switch from P-I Reader blog: Georgetown Stew to Blogging Georgetown. Did the transition and (I imagine) resulting freedom affect your writing as you expected?

Writing for the PI blog was tough for me, because I feel my legitimacy as an independent writer was undermined by the fact that Hearst more or less was getting a freebie, and I was giving it to them. I believe it made it tougher for the community to see my writing as advocacy. In moving on, I could experiment with different topics without fear that I was wandering too far off of the blog’s mission; to escape a sort of self-censorship I felt when I wrote for the PI blog. The end result was–I believe–me being more effective in what I originally set out to do.

Are you still the only contributor?

Yes.

You’re anonymous, right? How does that affect your ability to report things in the neighborhood?

I’m semi-anonymous. A cross-search could easily reveal who I am, where I live, and what I do for a living. But people in the neighborhood know who I am. I dabble in various local projects and I feel that those personal connections help keep me accountable for what I write.
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Defective Yeti was one of the four sites picked to receive an automatic bid during our Blarch Badness author caucus and for good reason: Matthew Baldwin, the man behind the Yeti, is quite possibly the best humorist writing in Seattle. (So much so that I can even forgive him for getting that damn Thank you for being a friend song stuck in my head for a week.) After threatening to debase myself further with pathetic begging, he kindly agreed to answer a couple of questions about his site and the Badness.

With the fact that we didn’t formally inform people last year that they had been entered into our little tournament, did you even know you were in it?

Oh my goodness, of course. I’m as obsessive about my referral logs as the next self-absorbed blogger, so as soon as the first person clicked over from your joint I was all over it like hollandaise sauce on Eggs Benedict. Disgusting, disgusting hollandaise sauce.

But, you know, I was nominated for a few Bloggies there back in Ye Olde Olden Dayes of blogging and was soundly beaten by a newcomer with name recognition in his corner, a pivotal moment in my life that engendered in me both a healthy wariness of Internet-related awards and a lifelong vendetta against Wil Wheaton.

You put up a pretty good showing considering your competition, West Seattle Blog, is – in my opinion – the Mafia. How do you deal with your popularity?

Ignore it, when possible.

In the wake of losing the aforementioned Bloggie, I resolved to make my site as popular as possible, and spent the following year trying to write memetic posts rather than writing about the things I cared about. Twelve months of that was quite enough, thank you.

Since then I’ve done pretty well at not giving a rat’s ass about readership (as is probably evident in my rather desultory posting schedule of late)(where “of late” = “since 2003″). At this point I’m not even sure if I still have one, though dozens of people still comment on each and every one of my posts to point out my copious grammatical errors.
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Mid Beacon Hill tried to concede gracefully when the Hood polls were taken over by Diebold. But would we let her? Noooo. Instead we forced her to stay in the race AND submit to an interview by me – drunk and obnoxious spice metroblogger. Why? Because we like her and because we think she’s doing good work. Since J is also extremely nice, she complied with only the slightest hint of arm twisting. Let’s jump right in, shall we…

How many minds are behind Mid Beacon Hill?

Just me.

Are you completely anonymous?

At this point, I’m only nominally anonymous.

When and what got you started in this tawdry blogging business?

A year ago I was doing a lot of gardening and wine drinking and neighborhood picture taking, and I happened to come across a blog by this guy in San Francisco who was doing the same. I loved how his drunken little photo essays captured his love of, and his ambivalence about, the neighborhood where he’d settled down. First I became an obsessive commenter on his blog, and then I decided I had to totally rip it off.
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And now, the Battle of West Seattle. In one corner is last year’s semifinalist West Seattle Blog, wielding its mighty Westside user base. In the other corner, you have Kirida, who was nominated for the tournament by West Seattle Blog. The student now faces the master. And since West Seattle Blog is involved, you just know the polling system is going to crash.

Open polls blah blah blah:
Seattle Daily Photo/Blogging Georgetown/Mid Beacon Hill – Defective Yeti/Glitter Pissing (closes Wednesday night)
Seattle Bubble/Accidental Hedonist (closes Sunday night)
Lookout Landing/Huskies Fan (closes Monday night)

The original bracket post

Tomorrow, the last of the quarterfinal brackets.

Huskies Fan chomped Capitol Hill Seattle, while Lookout Landing opened up an enormous lead on Three Imaginary Girls, which is to be expected when their competition is imaginary. And now, it’s Mariners vs. Huskies. Two sad, downtrodden fan bases competing for the only title they’ll see this year. Between Carlos Silva’s pitching and the Huskies inability to play defense, I’m expecting a high-scoring matchup filled with incredible frustration. Because that is, after all, what every Seattle sports fan expects — the crushing of all hopes in the most indignant way imaginable.

Bottom half of the Squirrel Bracket begins… now.

UPDATE: Apparently, there are some folks who think gaming the system is fun and exciting. Well, gaming the system can hurt you. It can damage tendons and ligaments. It can cause aggressiveness. It can make your balls shrink. Do you want to end up like Jose Canseco? No, you don’t, do you.

This is why you can’t have nice things. It’s back to the crappy polling system for you.

UPDATE 2: And that system just quit, too. Wonderful. So, on to version 3. Written in old fashioned HTML that makes me wince when reading it. Just kill me now.

The clock runs out Monday at 9pm PST, or when someone fires Bavasi, whichever comes first.

And now, the perfunctory links to the other open polls:
West Seattle Blog/Citizen Rain – Hillku/Kirida (closes Tuesday night)
Seattle Daily Photo/Blogging Georgetown/Mid Beacon Hill – Defective Yeti/Glitter Pissing (closes Wednesday night)
Seattle Bubble/Accidental Hedonist (closes Sunday night)

The original bracket post

Tomorrow: Can poetry beat motherhood? Can Citizen Rain stage a comeback? Are we staring at a West Seattle showdown?

I think I speak for most of us here at Seattle Metblogs when I say that Hillku is one of our favorites. Shrouded in mystery, they appeared out of the blue and charmed us with their haiku poetry about Capitol Hill. Below is a Q&A I did via email with City and Final, the two gracious purveyors of Hillku.

(Note: Hillku is facing a tough Round 2 charm-off with Kirida; voting is still open [m-b].)

Q:
who are you really?
the mystery confounds me.
at least: girl or guy?

A:
Straight Obama girl,
Homo Hills boy. Politics
Won’t divide us, though.
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Seattle Daily Photo enters the Blarch Badness competition tomorrow. I asked Kim some questions about her website, her favorite photos, and how the competition last year changed her Seattle outlook. Read on:

MB: When did you start Seattle Daily Photo? I starting contemplating doing SDP in October of 2005. I was at that time a daily visitor to a blog by Eric Tenin called Paris Daily Photo, and a few other loyal readers of his photoblog had contacted him and started similar blogs for their cities in Europe, Asia, and the US. My only digital camera at the time was in my Palm Zire which didn’t have the resolution for a photo blog, and our regular SLR was broken, so I couldn’t take and scan prints either. I was a full time student and working part time, and decided to save for a good digital SLR rather than invest in repairing our film camera. A lot of people were having similar thoughts because an explosion of affiliated new City Daily Photo Blogs took place over the next four months. I started laying out the blog template in November of 2005 and by February 2006 I had saved enough and started seriously camera shopping. Some other things came up that I had to focus on, and when I got back on track to launch the site I discovered another Seattlite named Rose had launched an affiliated blog for Seattle two days before. I was really disappointed. But, as luck would have it, after a couple months Rose stopped posting to her blog and Eric in Paris gave me the go ahead to start. I jumped in with a first post on July 8, 2006. I’ve been posting daily ever since, almost 600 posts now.
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West Seattle Blog launches their Blarch Badness campaign tomorrow, facing the winner of a Friends/Enemies group contest that’s down to the wire. So I pinged them on The Facebook and they obliged an interview in the midst of their plans for global domination.
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Huskies Fan Nathan Ware, of The Original DawgBlawg, was good enough to answer a few questions for us today. He’s gunning to take #1 seed Capitol Hill Seattle out of the running, and the competition between the two blogs has been fierce, and full of fan trash talking. It may be a groundbreaking battle, here at Blarch Badness. Let’s hear what Ware has to say.

MB: What was your impetus for starting up Huskies Fan?

NW: The main goal of starting the Blawg was to counter balance the anti-Huskies propaganda written by Jim Moore at the P-I. Ever since starting the Blawg, the planet seems like a better place. Kidding, of course, well, sort of. It’s kind of funny, too, because when I started the Blawg, I had no idea that it would take off the way it has. It’s been crazy. I could spend 80 hours a week writing.

MB: Are you from Seattle?

NW: I am from Seattle. Born and raised. I’ll probably live here my whole life, too, as I just can’t seem to find a place that feels like home to me the way Seattle does. This city is one of a kind.

MB: Where do you find your content?

NW: I get content from many different places. Much of it is just my personal thoughts on the team. I intently follow the players, the games, the coaches, etc. I’m a season ticket holder for football and basketball so I attend a lot of games and different functions. And, I’m kind of the world’s greatest “fly on the wall.” I find my own ways of hanging out with different people and gleaning information. I always tried to bring something a little different than the other news sources just to give people something unique. There’s never a lack of topics to discuss when you’re talking about UW football and basketball. As a school, we may not win a lot of games but we’re never boring.
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I had a quick chat with Justin Carder about Capitol Hill Seattle, a front runner in this year’s Blarch Badness tournament.

MB: When did you start CHS?
Shortly after we received the magic beans in January 2006. We moved to Capitol Hill on the edge of a richie rich neighborhood and said jeez, better start a neighborhood blog so we can get some respect from these people and they stop asking us to wash their boats. The rest is history.

MB: How many contributors?
Two. Me and my poor darling wife who has to suffer through my criticism and advice for her every post. Not sure why she continues to participate, really. She might move and get her own neighborhood blog. We’re trying to work through it.

MB: What’s your mission statement? (Why does this blog exist?)
I’ve stated our goals thusly:
1. Get to know our new neighborhood
2. Write about the good stuff in hopes that more good stuff will happen
3. Sometimes write about the bad stuff in hopes that less bad stuff will happen
4. Learn about how the Internet is put together and how people interact with it
5. Make it all last

But that only tells part of the story.
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