Seattlest Interview: Seablogs Creator Michael Montoure

Seattle resident Michael Montoure pursues a few of the more solitary activities that mankind has been able to dream up during our time on Earth: writing, web development. Maybe he started the blog community site Seablogs to counter that. We checked in with him recently in an attempt to figure out just what motivates a man to put in the hours necessary to create a directory this extensive.

Introduce yourself.

Hi, I'm Michael Montoure, a life-long Seattle native, and a writer who stumbled sideways into web development via desktop publishing. I have a long history of taking words and making them pretty. My work is in print -- you can order my horror anthology from my personal site, Bloodletters.
I'm 34, I live alone with my cat by the side of Echo Lake, and have a completely amazing girlfriend. And I make websites, of course.

Is a Seattle blog about Seattle or written in Seattle or do you make a distinction?

I don't make that distinction, generally, no. Although I have thought it might be nice to find a slick way to highlight blogs that are actually about Seattle on Seablogs, the site is open to anyone in the greater Seattle area with a weblog and a desire to be listed. Besides, I often find that even blogs that aren't "about" Seattle tend to mention the city and its happenings more often than not. Life creeps in to what we write, whether we intend for it to or not, and our surroundings play a big part of that.

Seablogs has to be the largest directory of local blogs in existence. How many are there? And how many do you read on a regular basis?

Do you mean, how many blog directories are there, or how many local blogs? If the former, I've got about a dozen listed in the "Beyond Seattle" section, and those are the only ones I know of offhand; I don't generally read any of them. If you mean, how many local blogs, a quick check of the database shows 815 listed on Seablogs, of which I read, hmmm -- maybe about half-a-dozen on a regular basis, depending how often you consider "regular." I don't actually spend a lot of time on-line anymore, surprisingly enough.

There are many ways to group blogs, one of which is geographically. What made you decide to list Seattle blogs as opposed to listing blogs about writing or web design?

I think one of the greatest things the Internet has done is to bring so many people and their ideas together -- but along with that comes a feeling of detachment and distance. A lot of people seem to act like the people on the other side of the screen aren't quite real. This is my way of saying, "Sure they are! Look! They're all around you!"

Finding a blog you love to read is great. But it's even better, I think, when you can realize that the person writing it lives not twenty minutes away from your house, walks down the same streets you walk, goes to the same shows you go to -- it grounds them a little, makes them more concrete and present in your life.

And of course, it also means you can meet them in real life, if you want to arrange it, without hopping on a plane. You have to love that.

Also, the map displayed on the Seablogs site is really cool. How did you make that and what purpose do you think it serves?

Ahhh, the map. I made that purely because I thought it would be, as you said, really cool. I took the GeoURL info that some weblogs had listed to get their latitude and longitude, and with others I pulled their ZIP code from their domain registration information and converted *that* to latitude and longitude. Once I had all that data, I took a map image and figured out roughly how many pixels in the image represented how many degrees on the map, and wrote a program in Perl that would convert the lat/long data into X and Y values, and -- here's the neat part -- edit the image for me and draw a little circle there for each one. It was all kinda tricky and it involved actual math, which is not my strong suit -- my first version of the map had half the locations end up under water. It seems to work fine now, though.

As far as what purpose it serves -- like the site itself, I think it largely serves an emotional purpose. We're very visual animals, still, and as much as I might hate to admit it as a writer, images do trump words. I could tell you there are over 800 bloggers in the Seattle area, and you'll nod and it'll make sense to you -- or I can show you the map, and you can *see* them. It helps make sense of it all.