Blogs? Dogs? What is this thing anyhow?

This is Coffee, a German Shorthaired Pointer. She's supposed to be a bird dog but the only birds that really interest her are chickens. Fortunately, we don't hunt and she lives in Key West -- and since I have lots of photos and she is an extremely good-looking dog, I figured she'd be a good subject for this blog, which I made for use in our workshop on blogging at the Monroe County Public Library in Key West.

What is a blog? Since we're using Blogger, we'll borrow their introduction, which seems to be a nice, short explanation:

A blog is a personal diary. A daily pulpit. A collaborative space. A political
soapbox. A breaking-news outlet. A collection of links. Your own private
thoughts. Memos to the world.
Your blog is whatever you want it to be. There
are millions of them, in all shapes and sizes, and there are no real rules.
In simple terms, a blog is a web site, where you write stuff on an ongoing
basis. New stuff shows up at the top, so your visitors can read what's new. Then
they comment on it or link to it or email you. Or not.
Since Blogger was
launched in 1999, blogs have reshaped the web, impacted politics, shaken up
journalism, and enabled millions of people to have a voice and connect with
others.
And we're pretty sure the whole deal is just getting started.

If you want to get into more detail you can read Wikipedia's entry on the subject. Just don't tell any other librarian I said so.

Baseball season

Coffee is a New Englander bred, if not born and raised and like me, she is devoted to the Red Sox. This photo captures the historic moment of Coffee listening to the Sox win the 2007 World Series -- we don't have cable so I subscribe to the radio feed online, through Major League Baseball's audio/video subscription -- it's a great deal, $15 for the whole season including playoffs and it's a fun old-fashioned way to follow the teams.

Since the point of this whole exercise is blogs I should point out that the new-fashioned way to follow your teams especially when you live far from home is via blogs -- my favorite for the Sox are Extra Bases, the Globe's baseball blog, and Boston Dirt Dogs, the rabid Red Sox fan blog. There's also 38 Pitches, pitcher Curt Schilling's blog, which gives an interesting inside take on the game. The New York Times baseball blog, Bats, is also very good although naturally too Yankee-centric for my taste. The newspaper based sites will often provide continuous updates throughout a game of what's going on, so if you don't happen to have a subscription or other access to the radio or TV, that's another way to follow a game as it's happening.

Coffee in action

You can link to video in a post, like I did below. Or you can embed it in the blog post, like I have here with this video taken (with our lousy point-and-shoot still camera) in the Higgs Beach dog park after Hurricane Ike had blown by. Coffee, as you can see, likes to run.

Coffee and Arlo

Coffee's best pal is another German Shorthaired Pointer named Arlo. We were already pretty much set on getting a pointer of some sorts (there are different kinds, the English Pointer or just plain Pointer, and the German Shorthaired as well as the rarer German Wirehaired Pointer). Then our friend Haven came back from Arizona with an adorable GSP puppy. I was won over, especially after the breeder in Arkansas where we had a deposit on a Pointer puppy did us wrong. So I got on the internet, found Coffee's breeder and the rest is history.
Arlo is much bigger than Coffee -- she's still pretty young in this photo but today, full grown, she is about 50 pounds while Arlo is about 80. He's also from a serious hunting kennel and will run, swim and play fetch for hours on end while she's all show -- bred to look good. Still, they seem to sense they're the same kind of dog and love to play together. Arlo's owner says Coffee is the only dog Arlo likes.

Here's a link to a YouTube video of them playing together at my house in the summer of 2008.

Another cute puppy picture

Here's Coffee on her first day in Key West, romping at Bill Butler Park. Interestingly, as she grew the brown patches spread and the lighter patches shrank so she appears much darker now than she is in this photo.

The other cool thing is that my mom used this photo to make an awesome cross stitch version of this picture.

This post is about blogs not dogs

Today's New York Times has an interesting story about how MIT and other colleges are embracing student blogs as part of their admission process. This illustrates how blogs are changing the way people receive -- and provide -- information. It allows prospective students to hear directly from students already at the college about their experiences. But the colleges have little, if any, control over what the students are saying about the place.

Coffee comes to Key West

Coffee the German Shorthaired Pointer came to live in Key West in June 2007. She is from a distinguished line of show dogs -- her great-grandmother was Best of Breed at the Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden; her grandmother, Scout, also showed there. Her mother (dam in dogshowspeak) is named Juliet; her father (sire) is Driver. Her official name is Kenshaw Mariah GSP Coffee. Around here we call her the Cup. This photo is the one I saw on the Internet that made me decide it was worth driving from Key West to Bradenton to get her.