ZOOM

People in Butte County are finally finding their voice online. Craigslist came to Chico last year.

I don't mean literally, like Craig showed up on a campaign bus to kiss babies--the site finally opened a Chico portal, where the burgeoning community of 80,000 and its outlying neighbors can finally get together, sell each other worn-out cars and biohazard sofas, and hurl racial/sexual epithets at each other.

The people have started crawling out of the cracks and testing the basic-text water. The Rants 'n' Raves section has grown some regular contributors. It's still sparse, though, taking weeks for responses to build up. It's desolate discussion, and enough to make a man thirst for denser discourse.

Now The Post has a growing blog colony ("blog colony" sounds kind of like the mildewed spot on the shower ceiling), and we want comments. Comments are currency--proof that someone is reading us. It's the incentive we require to keep pounding out the Movable Type prose.

But with the large senior population on the Ridge, I wonder how many of our readers will be motivated to seek this new outlet online (before you all lay into me about stereotyping seniors, my 76-year-old father spends more time online than I do). Also, with a younger generation entrenched in its own realm of online portals (MySpace, anyone?) and disinclined to subscribe to dowdy old print media, will anyone under the age of 30 feel it worthwhile to visit us here?

Because the blogs have potential, if people read them and respond. Will this become a new, more interactive 49er Speakeasy, with the debates, squabbles and completely out-of-left field ideas of the community bouncing off each other 24 hours a day? Or will it be desolate, like the Chico Craigslist Rants 'n' Raves?

I hope you, our readers, find us and make these posts of ours more than occasional, parched cacti amid a vast desert of discourse.

--Jeremy Walsh