ANNUAL MANUAL ’11: Rochester blogs

 [
LOCAL COLOR ] By Kate Antoniades

Amongst all the pharmaceutical-hawking spam messages, the
tweets about Justin Bieber’s new haircut, and the
YouTube comments that make you question your faith in humanity, you can still
manage to find plenty of good stuff online. The following local blogs, each
with a specific focus on an aspect of life in Rochester,
offer images, information, and opinions that are definitely worth a visit.

            Note that this
is just a sampling of local blogs; we welcome you to tell us about your finds
at the online version of this story at rochestercitynewspaper.com.

Jazz@Rochester

Greg Bell started Jazz@Rochester (jazzrochester.com)
partly to learn how to blog. Clearly, it worked: in the six years since he
created it, the site has become one of the Top 25 jazz blogs on the web and
gets several thousand page impressions a week, Bell says.

            Bell,
a principal attorney editor at Thompson Reuters, has strengthened his
connections in the jazz community, too. “It was kind of a hobby at first, but I
now know most of the jazz artists in town and count quite a few of them as
friends,” he says. The organizers of the Xerox Rochester International Jazz
Festival (which takes over downtown for a week-plus every June) grant him a
media pass, and he’s one of the sponsors of Exodus to Jazz, a series of live
performances at the LutheranChurch
of the Reformation.

            “The thing
about live music, especially jazz, is that…that’s really the only time it’s
going to happen,” he says. “The way jazz is played, because of the
improvisation, you’re going to hear it that way, and no one else is going to
hear it that way.”

            Bell
says he’s “religious” about his weekly Wednesday posts that list the upcoming
week’s jazz gigs. He draws from local listings as well as information the
artists send him themselves — and he posts without prejudice. “If somebody says
it’s jazz, I’m OK with it,” he says. “I’m not the jazz police.”

The RochesterNY
Pizza Blog

The blogger behind The Rochester NY Pizza Blog (rochesternypizza.blogspot.com)
wants to try every non-chain pizza place in the Rochester
area — and he’s getting close. “I’m probably about 90 percent there,” says the
man, a local attorney who prefers to remain anonymous. (On his blog, he refers
to himself as “Pizza Guy.”)

            Inspired by
food blogs like Slice (slice.seriouseats.com), Pizza Guy started the site in
2009. “I think even if I didn’t have the blog, I’d probably be doing this; I’d
be going to all these pizzerias anyway,” he says. “I love pizza, and when I
like something, I want to try every single one.”

            The blogger
posts one to three reviews a week and includes photos, thorough descriptions of
his meals, and details about other menu items. He assigns each restaurant a
letter grade from A to F. (Only one restaurant so far, a Chinese place, earned
a failing grade.) The blog gets about 150 to 200 visits a day, with a spike on
Fridays.

            Once in a while,
Pizza Guy says, he gets the urge to make his own pies. “I’ve gotten a lot of
respect for people who make pizza,” he says, “because it’s not as easy as it
looks.”

Environmental Thoughts

Now retired after a 30-year career with the U.S. Postal
Service, Frank Regan calls himself a “full-time environmental advocate.” He
says he became interested in environmental issues “through philosophy and
listening to programs on public broadcasting about the state of our
environment.”

            Regan’s an
active member of the Rochester Regional Group of the Sierra Club, leading its
zero-waste and transportation committees and serving as the group’s webmaster. He blogs about environmental issues at
rochesterenvironmentny.blogspot.com, an offshoot of his website,
rochesterenvironment.com, which he created in 1998. Each week, Regan
sends out an e-mail newsletter to about 600 subscribers.

            In his
posts, Regan takes national or world environmental issues, such as climate
change, and explains how they relate to Rochester.
To stay informed and find topics for his daily writings, he keeps up with the
latest news, attends numerous meetings, and keeps in contact with environmental
groups.

            Regan hopes
his visitors take his message seriously. “I hope they ‘get it,'” he says. “It’s
not just another issue…. It’s really the moral responsibility of everybody.
They have a responsibility to have an understanding of what’s going on and vote
properly.”

PictureRochester

Whether you’re using a point-and-shoot or a fancy digital
SLR, Rochester offers plenty of
photo opportunities. Joseph Moroz, the owner and lead
photographer at picturerochester.com, knows that firsthand: He’s posted more
than 1,500 images on the site, which has gotten more than
475,000 hits.

            Moroz, who currently works in the architectural and
construction fields, started the blog in 2005 with his then-business partner to
showcase their photography. He has continued to work on the site because he
admires Rochester’s art and
architecture and enjoys learning more about the area. “The city is full of
history,” he says.

            To capture
shots like his recent photos of DrivingParkBridge,
the Little Theatre, and the Eastman Dental Dispensary, Moroz
goes out at least three to five times a week. “Typically when I go shooting, I
shoot between 100 to 1,500 images a day,” he says.
“I’m very detail-oriented; I’ll shoot the same thing 50 different ways.”

            Moroz, who spends about 10 to 12 hours on the blog each
week, hopes that his photographs encourage visitors to take a second look at
his city. “I want people to rediscover the city of Rochester,”
he says, “and I would like for my website to help.”

Rochester Falconcam blogs

Peregrine falcons have been nesting in Rochester
buildings since at least the late 1990’s, first at Kodak headquarters and now at
the Times Square and Powers buildings downtown. Falcon
fans can get a closer look at these birds and their daily activities with the
Rochester Falconcam (rfalconcam.com), which offers
streaming video from six cameras. Once a Kodak project, the Falconcam
is now run by the Genesee Valley Audubon Society, along with its associated
blogs, Imprints (rfalconcam.com/imprinting) and FalconWatch
(rfalconcam.com/falconwatching).

            Jim Pisello, a Kodak employee, writes Imprints, while several
volunteer area falcon-watchers produce FalconWatch.
The blogs get about 50,000 visits each year, Pisello
says.

            FalconWatch details the birds’ activities, while Imprints
aims to educate, says Pisello, who writes about the
birds’ life cycles and behaviors in order to explain “what’s going on behind
the pictures,” he says. The blog also updates visitors on annual events like
banding day, when the Department of Environmental Conservation places ID bands
on the newest falcon chicks.

            The current
birds are Beauty, a female, and Archer, her mate. Lately, says Pisello, a newcomer has been “acting pretty cozy” with
Beauty during Archer’s winter migration. “If Archer returns,” he says, “we’ll
have a little bit of drama in March.”

RocWiki

While not exactly a blog itself, RocWiki
(rocwiki.org) provides a good foil for the websites above; while each of them
deals with a particular part of Rochester,
RocWiki covers all that the city has to offer. It’s
an extensive online guide to the area, from festivals to newspapers to
bakeries.

            As Pete B.,
one of the site’s seven volunteer administrators, explains, RocWiki
is “free for all, available to all, and also available for anyone to add to
it.” While some cities have similar sites, RocWiki — which
began in 2005 — is one of the best, says Pete (who declined to give his full
name). “We are one of the biggest and one of the most well-known [city-based wikis].”

            Pete, who
works in tech support for an internet-service provider, is the site’s current
top editor. Since getting involved in 2006, he’s made more than 25,000 edits,
he says. In an average week, he spends five to 10 hours working on the site.

            During a
recent week, RocWiki got 30,156 hits, Pete says. One
of its most popular sections is restaurants, where visitors can post comments
about their dining experiences. “All pages are available for anyone to update,”
he says. “This is our website. It’s not mine, it’s not yours — it’s
everyone’s.”

This article appears in Mar 16-22, 2011.