2008: Worcester Online
by taxi - December 28, 2008 12:10pm
Worcester’s Online Echo Chamber has had some notable moments and touched upon some interesting topics over the past year.
For two whole days in August, City Councilor Rick Rushton was a blogger.
The Worcester Regional Research Chest of Drawers dove into the blogosphere and (heh) made a big splash.
InCity Times, after years of being a print only bi-weekly, began to go online, …but ran into a great big pile of trouble. After that, another aborted attempt was made to go online again. But then, finally, InCity Times successfully went online in a third incarnation and quickly posted all sorts of interesting articles.
Back in September of 2007, Mike Benedetti began a podcast about Worcester called “508″, and it ran weekly through December 19th of this year. One of the more entertaining and informative pieces of the puzzle that is the Worcester Blogosphere, 508 will, hopefully, return in May 2009. Here is the complete archive.
LB Worm began the Wormtown Punk Punk Blog on January 14th.
Worcester lost the toilet museum.
The prospect of women dancing naked on Main Street inspired lots of noise. And it lasted a while, too.
The VegWorcester blog was born on March 18th.
A derelict tennis court gained much more attention than anyone in that neighborhood could have ever wanted, even in their wildest nightmares.
Worcester’s new place in the heirarchy of major motion picture locations may have gotten taken down a notch, but the city got yet another moniker: HollyWoo. And HollyWoo got plenty of additional movie-making exercise this year. The year had barely gotten past Spring when another casting call went out.
But the HollyWoo branding didn’t really take. In fact, the re-naming of Worcester and the sloganizing had gotten so bad that, at one point, No Slogan Day was born.
The city’s census went online.
After getting massive amounts of traffic on a post she made with pictures of Worcester’s famous Turtle Boy, Claudia launched the Turtle Boy Website.
Tracy started up the Whos of Who-cester blog on March 1st, about three months after having also launched the Cascading Waters blog.
I posted about the city’s first major wind power project from April through September.
Charter Cable tried to introduce an unwanted practice under the guise of a new service, but then changed their mind after the meme went national.
Mid-year gave us the beginning of a memorable meme: The Stupidest Person in Worcester. And Brendan wasn’t the only writer in town who decided to deride that same person.
Another oft-resurrected meme around these parts was the disappearing journalist cum shrinking noose-paper budget. But this last article by Scott McLennan was truly one of the lowest points… it was the end of an era.
Then another low point seemed to have arrived when WoMag got sold. Subsequently, there was the launch of two new newsy aggregatorish sites, RealWorcester and Worcester Wired. Later on, Charlene started her own blog.
WB Journal editor, Christina Davis started a blog in July. In September, they moved the blog over to the main site.
The Randell v Nemeth meme spanned the whole year.
Paulie went online in March.
Can we ever forget the hot dog ordinance?
And what would 2008 have been in Worcester without RojasGate?
The election campaigns sliced into everyone’s attention during September and October, and when the election was over, Worcester’s Online Echo chamber still had a few things to say.
There was predictability… There was decimation… And there was a preponderance of those who asked, “…knife ordinance?”
All things considered, and aside from the ice storm, the biggest and longest running story in Worcester this year has probably been the Asian Longhorned Beetle infestation. The video clip embedded in this post, however, gets my vote as the absolute best online coverage of the year.