Toronto already boasts several mass blogs, including Torontoist, blogTO, and Spacing Wire, an offshoot of Spacing (a magazine for urban issues geeks). Hot on the heels of the debut of U of T’s website Ulife, which keeps track of campus clubs, the campus can claim its own community blog, run by students who chronicle the daily goings-on around St. George campus.
BlogUT was started last month by a collective of current and former engineers led by Jingping Ji, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering. About 1,500 different people have visited their site in the last month, he said.
Ji pointed out that the internet makes for instantaneous coverage, unlike other media outlets. BlogUT’s coverage of the tuition freeze camp-out on U of T’s front campus field last month had one of its correspondents blogging live from the protest, relating events as they happened. And operating costs are minimal.
Though Ji posts the most-he is a graduate student, after all-BlogUT is looking for more writers, the more fanciful the better.
“We’re not typical engineers,” Ji noted. “We’re kind of artsy.”
-Mike Ghenu
