We're ramping up our efforts to get more local voices on our site (and in our paper). Joseph Montes, our community news editor, is starting to organize an effort that will hopefully result in the addition of several new neighborhood blogs.

To facilitate this push, we're hosting a class to teach interested people how to blog for us. The first installment is set for Thursday at 6:30 p.m. here at the TNT offices.

If it’s too far to drive or you can’t make it, e-mail Joseph Montes at joseph.montes@thenewstribune.com.

Following up on my last post, a reader sent me a link to a journal being maintained by a group from the Tacoma School of the Arts that is visiting China. The SOTA students are visiting Beijing, Yangzhou, Nanjing and Shanghai to volunteer for a nonprofit aid organization.

Another “students on the road” blog that just launched on our site follows a couple UWT students and local independent filmmaker to the Sundance Film Festival.

Both are limited engagements, so don’t wait to check them out.

How would like to be waking up this morning in Australia (where it’s summer)? Or Costa Rica? Or Paris? Or Italy?

While I’m not about to promise that reading a blog from one of those far-flung locales is the “next best thing,” I do want to highlight a new addition to our blog lineup. Sound Sounders Studying Abroad features four blogs currently and spans the globe chronicling the travels and experiences of local students as they study abroad.

We have a UWT student, Ryan Moss, in Costa Rica studying the environment and taking some amazing pictures. There is Halley Griffin, a UW student focusing on politics in Paris. PLU journalism professor Joanna Lisosky is leading 15 PLU students in the land down under, while PLU student Jessica Luppino just arrived in Florence, Italy.

If you know any other local students studying abroad who are blogging – or willing to blog – about their experiences, send me a note.

If you haven’t built a snowman or gone sledding yet, shame on you. OK, I have little kids so it looks (somewhat) normal for a grown man to be barreling down the double-jump hill at Point Defiance like I was yesterday. (Thanks be to Advil.)

Do you have any cool snow photos? Readers have sent us several, including a nice rendition of the headless snowman from Calvin and Hobbes fame (right). Upload yours here. Here’s some more from kevinfreitas.net, thriceallamerican, Sparkrobot and Exit 133.

Want a little satire with your snow. Check out Exit 133’s spoof that would be too good to be true.

Our Seahawks monster, Mike Sando, works his tail off to chart each of the Hawks' games with Excel spreadsheets. As a result, he ends up with data and statistics that can't be found anywhere else. This is one of the reasons the blog is so successful.

Leading up to this week's game in Chicago, one of the Second City's sportswriters thought it would be OK to use some of that proprietary data for his own. Tsk, tsk. The correction ran today.

I don't know all the details on how this happened, but let's hope that it didn't stem from someone deciding information posted in a blog - outside the traditional media format - doesn't deserve appropriate attribution.

Poppycock, I say. If it's good information, it's good information, no matter where it was first published.

According to muniwireless.com, as 2006 came to a close, there were more than 300 projects launched, in development or being planned to provide wireless internet coverage by cities, towns or other municipal entities.

The popular tech blog GigaOm predicted that 2007 will be the year of MuniFi. (Don't you like how we went from wireless internet to "wifi," then added "municipal" and now have "MuniFi"?)

Now that many cities have taken the plunge and turned on networks, this year we’ll likely start to get some answers to the many questions surrounding city-wide WiFi: Are a critical mass of consumers willing to pay to subscribe to these services, and at what price? Is the current network hardware good enough? Will cities end up saving money in public services, or wasting money on unused, weak networks? And will companies that dabbled with muniFi in 2006 like Microsoft, Clearwire, AT&T and Google, make more moves in 2007?

Let's hope the Rainier Communications Commission's plans and projects end up on the successful side of the ledger and our community is model for others to follow.

Russell, REI, Starbucks and Nordstrom were among the 100 Best Companies to Work For in Fortune Magazine's annual awards/list. Google was voted No. 1 in its first year of eligibility.

Some of the data in the online presentation is interesting to dig into. You can slice the 100 companies by such metrics as benefits and pay.

Did you know a senior computer scientist at Adobe makes $160,000 a year. I wish I liked math in school. Or that a Starbucks store manager makes about $42,000 a year? That's a lotta lattes.

Driving toward Point Defiance this weekend, I noticed some yard signs promoting a new web site: Race2WA.com. Not surprisingly, the site is an advocacy vehicle (pun intended) for the movement to bring a NASCAR track to a site near Port Orchard.

It’s slick site, with a video plea from Vancouver native NASCAR driver Greg Biffle and a handy “Email your Elected Officials” page where all you do is click on your district and the form is filled in for you (a feature we ought to consider). You get the sense there’s some money behind this effort – this doesn’t feel like “grass roots.”

So I checked out the WHOIS database to see which passionate local race fan had underwritten this effort and was not entirely surprised to find ISC.com as the domain owner. International Speedway Corporation is the outfit that owns NASCAR and a dozen other tracks around the country and the one that is hoping to build the one in Port Orchard.

Unfortunately, there is no link to contact the webmaster. Otherwise I’d send an email taking them to task for violating the copyright of local news outlets by republishing their stories (presumably) without permission. They do give us credit, but is it too much to ask for a link? If you’re a multi-billion dollar corporation, apparently the answer is yes.

If you like news roundup blogs, check out the Olympia Business Watch. It's written by Richard S. Davis and published by the Association for Washington Business. It publicly launched a few weeks ago.

Between it and the Cascadia Report, you could get a regular roundup of important policy and business news stories with just a couple of stops (or RSS feeds).

There is also a podcast available for the AWB's weekly radio show.

Davis recently served as a regular guest columnist (and a popular one) on the editorial pages for The News Tribune.

According to Davis, the goal of the blog is "to give our members (and others who drop by) access to daily commentary and news stories affecting business and politics in the state.

"For us, it's the logical next step," Davis wrote in an email, "supplementing Washington Business (our bimonthly magazine), Fast Facts (our weekly policy update), and (AWB president) Don Brunell's weekly column."

Currently, Davis (who's the VP of communications) is the only one posting. But he expects Brunell and Gary Chandler, VP of Government Affairs, to contribute in the future.

“Why does someone always have to get hurt for us to have any fun around here.”

That little bit of black humor was heard in our newsroom yesterday as dozens of reporters, editors and photographers hustled to tell the story of a fatal high school shooting. Breaking news challenges journalists to be at their best, while too often the circumstances are so tragic. It is an uncomfortable dichotomy that we live with.

As editor of the web site, my goal is to get more traffic to the site every day. Yesterday we had plenty. Not really cause for celebration, of course, since the spike in page views was the result of senseless violence. Still, it’s our job to inform the public during these trying times and we can take some solace in the fact that many people trust us to be their source of information.

Here’s what our web traffic looked like yesterday, tracking all page views on our site.

If you’re wondering what’s going on at Mount Rainier - especially if you’re a climber – you should already be aware of Mike Gauthier’s blog. But even non-climbers (or once-in-a-lifetime climbers like me) want to know what the status of the park is these days, now that the snow is falling and high winds and heavy rain have rearranged much of the park’s road system.

Gauthier, also known as “Gator,” is the lead climbing ranger at Rainier and something of a living legend, according to TNT adventure scribe Craig Hill. Gauthier lives inside the park and knows it inside and out. Authority is what makes a blog great, and apparently there is no better authority than “Gator.”

In 2004, Gauthier made Men’s Journal’s list of 25 Toughest Guys in America (at No. 4). The perception of blogs keeps changing and now, we can safely say, tough guys have blogs, too.