Wanted: Eagle Rockers Who Understand 'The Eagle Rock Effect'

A little more than 10 months ago—at 2:18 p.m. on May 4, 2011, to be precise—the following words appeared on Eagle Rock Patch:

If you are reading this blog, then you—like me—may suffer from “compucrastination,” the inability to stop procrastinating in front of the computer. I cannot cure you, but during the periods I own your eyeballs I will attempt to ensure that these precious minutes of your life are somehow illuminated, educated or just entertained.

That was the beginning of Eagle Rock resident Peter Choi’s first blog for this site, intriguingly titled, “The Eagle Rock Effect.” Choi’s 10 blogs on Patch so far—an average of one per month—have covered topics ranging from food, hiking and music to politics, environmentalism and aesthetics.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Choi’s debut blog was his promise that he would try to illuminate the lives of his readers while also educating or entertaining them. Perhaps without realizing it, Choi had put his finger on the three features that distinguish just about every blog or opinion piece ever written.

In fact, in a critically acclaimed 2011 book titled “The Space of Opinion: Media Intellectuals and the Public Sphere,” sociologists Ronald Jacobs and Eleanor Townsley identify five broad styles that characterize opinion articles in the media. According to the authors, opinion pieces either (1) ask a question; (2) provide information; (3) reframe an issue; (4) make specific arguments; or (5) make moral arguments. (Of course, an article may meet more than one—or even all—of these criteria.)

Looking back at the 90 blogs that our many readers have posted so far on Eagle Rock Patch—an average of about nine blogs per month—it’s satisfying to note how many of them seek to do precisely what Choi promised in his debut blog: to illuminate, educate or entertain.

In about six weeks, we will celebrate a year of blogging from our readers. We are already on the path to hit the 100-blog mark in a few days—and we’d like to amp that number up as 2012 progresses. Our goal is to feature a blog every week day—and we know we can achieve it. We already have an average of two blogs per work week—we need only three more weekly.

If you haven’t blogged on Patch, perhaps the “Eagle Rock Effect” hasn’t yet taken a hold on you. Or perhaps—to slightly modify and turn that blog title on its head—you have yet to realize how powerfully you can “Affect Eagle Rock.” Either way, we can safely predict that once you come to appreciate how joyful and influential blogging can be, you will be unable to resist the urge to give new meaning to the words Peter Choi so memorably coined.

To learn more about our major bloggers, click on their names below and follow their blogs:

Peter Choi
Jon McDuffie
Jan Freed
Rob Tossberg


Severin Martinez

Maggie Freed