> ## Content Index > Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.smdp.com/llms.txt > Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further. # Migrating to the blogosphere - URL: https://www.smdp.com/migrating-to-the-blogosphere/ - Published: 2008-09-10T15:00:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-24T20:58:38.000Z - Author: Guest Author - Tags: Real Estate & Housing, Downtown, #archive-import, Homelessness *Santa Monica blogs are sometimes business, sometimes pleasure* *By CHRISTINA YOON Special to the Daily Press* DOWNTOWN If a person is what he eats, then it’s probably safe to say that a city is what it blogs. Such is the case in Santa Monica, where several local blogs, many less than a year old, have formed to represent some of the issues at the forefront of residents’minds.Popular local blog topics include real estate issues, the bicycling community and environmental activism. “There’s a lot of people in Santa Monica and a lot of people who are interested in Santa Monica, either to move to in the future or to visit on vacation, so there’s a large audience,” said the creator of Santa Monica Distress Monitor (smdistress.blogspot.com), who goes by the online name “Warchest” and declined to reveal his real name. He started the Distress Monitor a year ago to track what he considers to be an imminent decline in the local real estate market. “I got interested in real estate as things got more and more irrational,” he said, “and after spending way too many hours online and looking at other blogs, studying statistics.” Warchest, who grew up in Santa Monica and hopes to own a home here sometime soon, lists recent reductions in sale prices and often offers humorous commentary on the property descriptions created by real estate agents. Although he works in finance, not real estate, and rarely shares his own opinions on local issues such as homelessness or the City Council that come up in the comment threads from time to time, Warchest has decided to maintain his anonymity. “Ultimately I don’t think (my identity) really matters much because I’m not selling anything,” he said. “But it’s not something I want all my friends or coworkers knowing about. If anything, I think it’s sort of nerdy to be spending so many hours on something like this. Maybe that’s why.” Although he doesn’t mention it, the anonymity also protects the blog from the disapproving glare of local real estate agents and property owners,although many read the blog regularly. “I found that if you suggest a potential decline (in housing prices), especially to realtors or people who recently bought property here, it was sacrilege in a way,” he said. It’s no surprise that property issues tops the list of most popular local blogs. The real estate blogs, however, are not relegated to real estate naysayers in Santa Monica. Jodi Summers, who works with Sotheby’s International Realty, owns the Santa Monica Property Blog (www.santamonicapropertyblog.com), a site designed to aggregate local information from her real estate resources as well as more main-stream publications like Forbes. The blog was created more than two years ago, a spin-off from her other Web site projects tracking Southern California real estate news. “They’re basically my main source of garnering new clientele now,” Summers said of her blog and Web sites. While some bloggers fiercely protect their identities while writing about local issues, especially controversial ones, Summers welcomes the connection that locals make between the information she provides and the work that she does. She says that the business benefits of her blog don’t compromise the journalism that she believes it provides. “I tend to get my information from valid sources,” she said. “Certainly I’ve said things that offended somebody, but that’s just the nature of doing something out in public.” This constant risk of offending someone out in the blogosphere is what compelled Dan Jansenson, a Santa Monica architect and a member of the Santa Monica Treesavers, to disable the comment function on the Treesavers’ blog (treesavers.blogspot.com). “Frankly, I don’t have the time to moderate the comments,” Jansenson said. “I’ve seen some of the other pieces that mention us out there.Some of the ones that comment are very angry about this and are filled with hateful emotions.” While bloggers such as Warchest consider an active comment thread to be a sign of the blog’s success, Jansenson said that, for now, the year-old Treesavers blog serves mostly as a place for fellow Santa Monica tree activists to gather and share information. “This is not intended as a source of dialogue,” he said. Both Jansenson and Summers said that while there are plenty of topics that are ripe to be blogged about in Santa Monica, they are wary of city government-run blogs. Jansenson said that he would not read “anything run by the city.” In fact, there is in fact a new City Hall-funded blog, Santa Monica Connect (santa-monicaconnect.org). The blog, which launched last month, aims to provide an easy at-home resource for Santa Monica residents to link up to local nonprofit organizations. The blog, which is run by the 18th Street Art Center, recruits high school and college students in Santa Monica to regularly blog about Santa Monica nonprofits. “I think this is a really cool thing that we’re doing,” said Jessica Perez, a student at Santa Monica College who blogged about six local nonprofits,“because a lot of people don’t even know about these things that could really help them, especially the low-income people of Santa Monica.” The blog was the result of an initiative by the Cultural Affairs and Health and Human Services departments to increase awareness of the services that were available to residents. Jan Williamson, the executive director of the 18th Street Art Center, said that although blog administrators have not yet begun to record page-view or click-through metrics, this will be the next step in measuring the blog’s effectiveness. “This is a project that’s going to have ongoing little renovations,” Williamson said. “There’s a lot of ways we can drive traffic and network nonprofits together. We’re excited about how that will evolve over time.” Nearly all of the local bloggers, both new and established, said that they look to what many consider to be the original Santa Monica blog, the Santa Monica Dispatch (www.santamonicadispatch.com). The blog was started in 2006 by Peggy Clifford, one of the founding members of the local weekly newspaper the Santa Monica Mirror. The site offers breaking news and news analysis about local politics and topics that interest Clifford, the site’s main contributor. “The Dispatch was started sort of in the same spirit of the Mirror that I started,” Clifford said. “At the risk of sounding pompous, it’s the residents’ voice that we’re trying to get across.” Some Santa Monica bloggers, however, have no interest in capturing the residents’ voices, or even their attention. Mark Gorman, for example, simply wanted a place to consolidate all of the information he accrued as he began to build his home in the Third Street Historic District. “To me, it’s a better form of Facebook, because I think I’m too old for Facebook,” Gorman said of his Wordpress blog.“I’m a little bit nervous about getting comments for people and having it be public.” Luckily for Gorman, no one has commented on his posts yet, but he encouraged even the least tech-savvy residents to blog about whatever interests them in Santa Monica. Current Santa Monica bloggers said that they’d love to see new sites popping up about local topics including local politics, public transportation and wine. “If you can use a word processor, you can start a blog,” Gorman said.“It’s amazing.” *Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on September 10, 2008.* [Read the original PDF.](https://s3.us-east-1.amazonaws.com/smdp%5Fbackissues/091008.pdf?ref=smdp.com)