Thanks to Paul Bausch and ORblogs

Blogriculture is not specifically intended to be an Oregon blog, or even a blog about Oregon agriculture. The intent when I started it was to have a blog about agriculture in the Western states of California, Idaho, Washington and Oregon.

But the simple fact of the matter is that Blogriculture is an Oregon blog because the people who contribute to it most are in Oregon most of the time. For good or ill, blogging is largely a first-person perspective thing. Bloggers write about what they see, hear and know or what they are interested in and the immediate geography around us all has a huge influence on what interests us personally and professionally.

I'm proud to say that Blogriculture has been part of the ORblogs directory/community since the very early days of this blog's existence. If you aren't familiar with ORblogs, that's too bad, because Orblogs is going away.

ORblogs' creator Paul Bausch posted a notice on the website on Thursday, Sept. 4, that ORblogs is closed. He writes that he's going to leave the directory in place for a while to give people time to figure out other ways to monitor their favorite blogs, but you won't be able to find the latest post from Oregon-based blogs there anymore.

The site was a pretty cool thing if you were interested in what the latest buzz was in the Oregon blogosphere. You could go to one site and see things like the most recent posts, most popular topics written about, most popular posts with ORblogs' visitors. You could (and still can for a little while at least) find blogs based on what cities the bloggers were blogging from. What made it even more remarkable, is that this was all just a side gig, a hobby, for the guy who created it — Paul Bausch.

Of course many of the best, or at least most interesting, blogs out there are written by people who write out of passion, not for pay. That passion, in the best blogs and bloggers, comes out in their writing. Oregon bloggers got to share their passion much more efficiently and effectively with the help of Paul Bausch and ORblogs. ORblogs was not a perfect site, but it was a great resource for finding interesting blogs based here and a way for bloggers based here to get some exposure for their little corner of the blogosphere.

I don't know Paul personally. I think we exchanges a few e-mails back in the days I was getting Blogriculture hooked up with his site. But from what I've read about him, he's a pretty remarkable dude. He helped create the Blogger software popular with many blog writers (including the software we use here at Blogriculture). Do a Google search of his name or follow this link to his biography on his site pdcoding.com or on his about onfocus.com page if you want to read more about him. For example, you will find that he is web developer, author and a journalism graduate from the University of Nebraska who is based in Corvallis, Ore.

It just seemed appropriate to give Paul and ORblogs some recognition and appreciation here on our website for what he has contributed to bloggers in general and Oregon bloggers in particular.

As a native Nebraskan, a journalist trained in technical writing in Corvallis at Oregon State and an amateur computer geek, this Oregon blogger just wants to say thanks. ORblogs will be missed, but I am thrilled that it was around for as long as it was. It was an honor to be included in ORblogs.