From music to travelogs, Penn writers fill the blogosphere

College junior Ariella Chivil had a bone to pick with The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Chivil, who started a blog over the summer about life and her struggle with cancer, initially intended for only her inner circle of friends to know she was the author. But when she found her picture on the front page of the DP on Oct. 22, she was shocked — so she blogged about it.

Chivil was photographed on the runway of the “Claim Your Beauty” fashion show — a celebration of Penn Women Center’s “Love Your Body Day” — for which she had removed her wig. She didn’t expect to see the picture on the front page and wrote about the experience in her blog, called Cruella Theory. Now, she wonders whether the event will expand her audience.

Penn’s blogosphere is pretty potent. Student publications, individuals and groups of friends turn to this medium as an outlet for their interests.

On one end of the spectrum, First Call, a Penn literary journal, uses the blog platform WordPress to archive past issues. But newer blogs such as Sleeping in Van Pelt, which regularly posts photographs of people napping in the library, often use microblogging platforms like Tumblr.

“People always take pics of people sleeping and show them to their friends for a two-second laugh, so we thought it would be great if we could just amalgamate it for public viewership,” said one of SIVP’s four co-founders, who all asked to remain anonymous due to a complaint from someone offended by a recent post.

Some students don’t care about having a large audience yet find blogs an effective way to share their experiences with people close to them — particularly when studying abroad.

“I wanted to keep some sort of journal,” said Engineering junior Melissa Cedarholm, a student at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, Switzerland. Cedarholm’s blog includes many “cultural notes” or lists of quirky European novelties.

“For a Dutch guy to ask a girl to a formal dance, like prom … [h]e has to write in silver ink on a special blue piece of paper, formally asking her to the dance … to accept, the girl has to invite him over for a cup of tea … Isn’t that cute and old-fashioned?” Cedarholm wrote in one entry.

Cedarholm’s blog has had 277 views this month from friends and family.

Rather than a play-by-play of his time away, College junior and DP photographer Jake Werlin’s blog chronicles memorable stories from Buenos Aires, Argentina, like the time two old ladies pretended they were helping him remove bird poop from his backpack and then made off with his wallet and camera.

But some, including College junior Adam Saltzman, who has remained on campus, question whether student blogs are worth reading. “What they write has no impact on me or my global concerns, so there’s no incentive to read them,” he said.

Still, Steven Waye, who graduated from the College last year, wrote his creative thesis from a blog he kept while hitchhiking last summer. For his “Mississippi Project,” sponsored by the Kelly Writers House, 2008 College graduate Gabe Crane used a Treo 650, which accesses the internet through cell phone service, a collapsible keyboard and a solar panel to blog as he canoed with his friends down the Mississippi River one summer.

Back at Penn, some campus organizations — including fashion magazine The Walk and food magazine Penn Appétit — have turned their blogs into semi-independent entities.

As is the case with most blogs, Penn Appétit’s site publishes less formal articles, “anything that a Penn kid looking for some online entertainment or distraction would want to stumble upon,” according to PA’s Editor-in-Chief Elise Dihlmann-Malzer, a College senior.

“I don’t like full articles,” said College junior Rebecca Rosen, who frequents Under the Button and the The Walk’s blog. “I read a couple of blogs once a day because it’s a quick way to catch up on all current things going on [around] campus.”

A more independent blog, God Save the Beat — which launched in July under the parentage of the Kelly Writers House — fills the void music blog Tripping Franklins, which once had 4,000 monthly viewers, left after its four musical pundits graduated or moved on to more professional projects.

A former reader of Tripping Franklins, God Save the Beat co-founder and College junior Jeremy Levenson took a different approach for his blog, which attracts an average of 800 readers per month. GSTB features in-depth album and concert reviews, as well as “riff-raff” on issues in today’s music current. The last “riff-raff” post, written by College sophomore Juan Carlos Melendez-Torres, was on an obscure band called Indian Rebound: They “wear their influences on their sleeves and still make it sound new and fresh,” he wrote.

It’s hard to keep it up, though, especially for a pre-med and humanities double major like Levenson. He said he plans to recruit more writers who want to “dig deep and learn from other people.”

“At its best,” Levenson said, “blogging can develop community between people who may not have ever met in person, but who become comfortable engaging in a good discussion about things that matter to them.”

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.