IN 2003 WAR WAS BEGINNING
Actually it wasn’t, we were just starting a blog. A lot has gone down since then and so we thought it would be appropriate to lay a path through the Metblogs Memory Lane that you could stroll through, if for some reason you were into that kind of thing.

Sometime in early mid 2003 Jason DeFillippo and Sean Bonner started talking about their unfruitful hunt for local info in the city they lived in, Los Angeles. Both were transplants from other parts of the country and were frustrated with the fact that local papers were either collections of syndicated pieces written by people not in Los Angeles, or completely devoid of opinion. What good is a restaurant review if the author never says if the food was actually good or not? Both having their share of world wide web experience (Jason with Blogrolling.com, and Sean with stupid memes), they were both finding that the really useful local info was coming from people, locals, on their own blogs rather than more traditional media sources. Of course even then it wasn’t easy to find, they had to sift through endless posts about cats and jobs and kittens to finally find the one post about a local topic. Just by way of discussion a concept of one site with a limited topic but with many authors came into being. One summer evening at a Starbucks on Melrose, the idea for a local group blog was born. A few months later blogging.la was launched.

This was intended to be a one city one site kind of project, essentually creating the site they wanted to read themselves. The web had other ideas. Almost immediately people in other parts of the country started e-mailing saying how much they liked the site and asking if there were any plans to launch similar sites in other cities. In a profile for the Los Angeles Times in early 2004, the pair leaked the news that those plans were very much in the works. By the end of that year there would be Metroblogging sites in 25 cities around the world. Of course there was something much more newsworthy happening at the end of 2004 and for the first time it became clear that Metroblogging was serving a larger purpose.

The Tsunami that hit Thailand at the end of 2004 grabbed the worlds attention, and Bangkok Metblogs was there reporting first hand details of how this impacted the lives of the people who actually lived there. This wasn’t some anonymous talking head, this was the local story by actual locals. Similar situations happened later that year when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and Pakistan was rocked by a massive earthquake. These events were tragic on many levels, but the presence of Metblogs sites in these cities gave residents a reliable source of local info, gave the authors of these sites a means to help their communities, and gave the world a new window into how these events actually effected the lives of the people in the center of them.

(More coming soon…)