Blogger Ed Cone of Greensboro talks here about the several intersections he overlooks. That is: junctions of the public and the personal (which every blogger faces) and more particularly the contrasting voices of a newspaper columnist and a blogger (he is both) and the opportunities for a local conversation in a global medium.
Ed Cone is a 4th generation North Carolinian and a man of respect in Greensboro. He’s a Sunday editorial wiseman on the Greensboro News and Record, and he’s thought of running for mayor of Greensboro, as he said in our conversation. So he’s up to his neck in local life. At the same time he’s a well known tech writer in national publications (WIRED, Forbes and Ziff Davis magazines, among others) and he swims in the global ocean of bloggers, with distinction. The longer we talked–about the emerging “Tar Heel Bloggers,” the political leverage for bloggers in city and statewide campaigns, and the lure of the “North State” and North Carolina conversation–the more in love he seemed to be with the local pleasures of bloggery. It’s nice to be cited by Glenn Reynolds and picked up in “the bigs” now and then. But it may be nicer to have a strong voice in the neighborhood. Local blogs, Ed Cone says, “are one of the next big things.”
I wanted to find out also whether Ed Cone has different voices in different media, and now I’m sure he does. Only on his blog does he use the vernacular and post pictures of his kids. Or as he put it himself: his career is at Ziff Davis. At the newspaper, he keeps his oar in politics and he makes greens-fee money. But his joy is in the blog. It’s only the blog that makes his wife a little jealous. “You have to follow your passion on this,” Ed Cone said. “You spend time on stuff you love, and good things happen.” Listen in.
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