A Visit from Kevin Freitas

The Living and Working class had the honor of another guest lecturer yesterday. Kevin Freitas, of www.kevinfreitas.com and www.feedtacoma.com, got to share his experiences starting, running and aggregating blogs in and about the South Sound and Tacoma. Kevin works as a developer at SiteCrafting and has hand built the blogs that he writes and manages.

Most recent of the projects and one with great momentum and potential is FeedTacoma. A marriage of RSS feeds, South Sound blogs, a plethora of photos and photo adventures, discussion groups and an event calendar, it also boasts one of the few political and subversive cartoons in the Tacomic.

The general nature of the aggregation of the blog postings from several divergent sources (with common themes and differing perspectives) strikes me as being similar to an Associated Press or United Press International offering. It is the new South Puget Sound news feed, with the news being highly localized, personal and frequently unabashedly biased. Nothing wrong with that.

"Hey, what's going on in Tacoma?"

"I don't know, let's see what's come across the Blog wire."

Kevin has an open source sensibility and allows for postings to come from a multitude of sources. With 21 one current contributors, including this blog, that allows for many postings per day. But unlike traditional blog postings, this are titles with first paragraphs of the noted post acting as the synopsis.

As it grows and as more blogs contribute, it will be interesting to see how it can maintain its focus, or whether it will have to further break down and categorize the copy as it rolls in.