It’s about time I got around to adding The Dead Parrot Society to my blogroll — and not just because I got a nice atta-boy email yesterday from Parrot co-conspirator Ryan Pitts, a newsie at the Spokesman Review of Spokane, Wash.
One cool thing about the Parrots is how they illustrate the process of online communities coming together and staying that way over years, even decades. (Testy Copy Editors started out the same way, as an AOL chatroom). Another cool thing about the Parrots is the fact that most of them have don’t work in the media so they don’t have the “professional grounding” that is such a huge leg up for anybody trying to turn words and pictures into pixels — greatly enhancing the Parrots’ blogosphere outsider credentials. (They’re all well-educated professionals, though: an epidemiologist in Seattle; a copyright guru in Pennsylvania; a statistics prof in Texas; a lawyer in Kentucky; an actuary in Arkansas.)
Finally, the Parrots prove that blogging doesn’t have to be a solo operation, and that multiple voices don’t have to cloud a blog’s vision. It’s really easy to open up a blog to multiple contributors, and I’ve been tempted to do that here — but I like this thing too much to share at the moment.
Speaking of Pitts, he praises copy editors in a post here.