On April 15, 2005, I started a blog on Blog*spot called “Summers in Peoria.”  Over the past year, that has turned into The Peoria Chronicle, with my own domain name and WordPress interface.

My thanks to everyone who reads my little online magazine of news and commentary on our fair city of Peoria.  I enjoy so much the comments and discussions, and yes, even the arguments we’ve had over the past year.

I never promised I’d do this forever, but I’m still having fun, so I think I’ll keep at it for a while longer.  Thanks again for reading.

Really.  I had the opportunity to steal Bill Dennis’s domain name this morning when he accidentally let it expire.  Wouldn’t that have been a riot?  All of Bill’s thousands of visitors would have brought up peoriapundit.com like they usually do and — surprise! — the Chronicle would have popped up.  Imagine my hit counts!  I would have been king of the Peoria blogosphere!

For a day, anyway.  Then there would have been riots, I would have been hanged in effigy, and angry mobsters would have kidnapped me and held me hostage in a dank corner of a Kingspark Mobile Estates trailor until I transferred ownership of the domain back to Mr. Dennis.

I like to read the technology journal The New Atlantis, and this issue there is an excerpt from Glenn Reynolds’ (Instapundit.com) new book, An Army of Davids. I encourage you to read it. The article is titled “The Rise of Guerrilla Media,” and it’s full of intriguing ideas, like this one:

An organization that put together a network of freelance journalists under a framework that allowed for [a] reputation rating [like Amazon.com’s], and that paid based on the number of pageviews and the ratings that each story received, would be more like a traditional newspaper than a blog, but it would still be a major change from the newspapers of today. Interestingly, it might well be possible to knit together a network of bloggers into the beginnings of such an organization. With greater reach and lower costs than a traditional newspaper, it might bring something new and competitive to the news business.

The inherent limitation in blogging, as I see it, is the fact that it’s just me, or just you, out there trying to gather facts and information and publish as a hobby. We don’t have reporters we can send out, and no one has figured out a way to make money at it, although Bill Dennis has certainly tried.

This would probably never work, but I had this crazy idea. Imagine several local bloggers uniting to form a freelance journalistic cooperative. I know we all have links to each other now, but suppose we had a single site — a meta-blog, if you will — where we all submitted original news copy and analysis about Peoria. For the masses who don’t have the time or inclination to go blog-hopping, this would provide a one-stop source for alternative Peoria media (or “we-dia,” as Jim Treacher calls citizen journalism).

If it became a popular source for news, we could sell advertising and split the revenue in some mutually-agreeable way (number of hits like Reynolds suggested, or number of contributions, or something). Why, it would almost be like having a second newspaper in town, only we wouldn’t have the overhead of newsprint and distribution.

Like I said, it’s a crazy idea, but fun to kick around just for the heck of it. What do you think? Potentially workable or laughably implausible? “Strength in numbers,” or “too many cooks spoil the broth”?

Jason Fry of the Wall Street Journal Online gives his opinion about the future of blogging. He covers everything from the number of blogs to blog measurement, including these recent Gallup poll results:

Beyond flat to declining blog traffic, it found just 9% of Internet users read blogs frequently, 11% do so occasionally, 13% rarely bother, and 66% never do. And “reading blogs” ranked last in a list of 13 common Internet activities, below things like emailing, checking news and weather, and shopping.

His prediction for the future, in a nutshell:

Within a couple of years blogging will be a term thrown around loosely — and sometimes inaccurately — to describe a style and rhythm of writing, as well as the tools to publish that writing.

As opposed to a “revolution,” which is what some bloggers still hope for.  If you have a couple minutes, read his whole article and tell me what you think of it.

How long do you think this will last?  Can Bill be master of his domain for a whole week?  I’m going to bet his sabbatical lasts no longer than three days.

At least, I hope it doesn’t last too long — I read his site first every day….

No one knows more about trains–specifically Peoria trains–than my friend David P. Jordan. I’ve been part of the PeoriaRails Yahoo Group for quite some time now and have enjoyed his insight into this little-reported part of Peoria’s transportation system.  Now David has established his own blog to report “news, information and analysis of local rail transportation issues.”  As a bonus, he will also be covering commercial aviation issues.

This is a very welcome addition to my blogroll.