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Pam's House Blend

Employee's blog wins praise from readers

Pam Spaulding's blog has received national honors.

Her topics are controversial, and she expresses her ideas vividly. But Pam Spaulding says she's not running her award-winning blog merely to bring attention to her own opinions. She says she "puts things out there to find out what other people think."

"I'm black, I'm a lesbian, I'm in the South, and I have lived in the North. I represent different constituencies that aren't well-represented in the blogosphere," says Spaulding, an information technology specialist with Duke University Press.

Pam's House Blend, with its coffee-cup logo and slogan "always steamin,'" is at www.pamshouseblend.com.

Blogs (short for weblogs) have evolved from online diaries to become communities of people with similar interests who communicate over the Internet. Spaulding's blog attracts a community of readers who voted hers the best LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender) blog at the 2005 Weblog Awards (weblogawards.org).

Recent posts addressed issues such as gay marriage and the American Family Association's boycott of Ford Motor Co. with comments such as, "I had to post this nonsense because it made me laugh out loud this AM."

Spaulding also urged readers to protest a reggae concert meant to raise awareness about HIV/AIDS, a concert she said includes two performers who are anti-gay. As part of the post, she included a Human Rights Watch report on AIDS in Jamaica and contact information for concert organizers.

"Caribbean nations such as Jamaica have the highest incidence of HIV infection outside of Sub-Saharan Africa," she wrote. "We should care about this, and the culturally ingrained homophobia and denial that helps the virus spread."

That mixture of snappy prose, funny postings and serious commentary on issues such as LGBT rights, race, gender and national politics won her about 30 percent of the vote in her category at the Weblog Awards

This year the awards, created by Kevin Aylward (Wizbangblog.com), featured almost 500 blogs in 37 categories. Anyone could nominate any blog for an award, and voters had about 15 blogs to choose from in each category.

Aylward says readers like Spaulding's blog because she covers issues relevant to the community she serves. One of Spaulding's readers whose online name is Chandler in Hollywood nominated her for the award. He said he did so because "she is a unique person, in a unique place with a unique point of view with such universality that it is really hard not to like her."

Spaulding started her blog in July 2004, she says, as her own "screaming into the void," a reaction to her dissatisfaction with American politics. However, while the blog focuses on political commentary, she also writes about herself, her partner Kate and their three dogs -- Tonka, Bailey and Chloe.

Her blog is done in her free time and is unrelated to her job at Duke Press, where she is the manager of the six-person Information Technology Department. A Duke Press employee since 1993, she serves on the Office of Institutional Equity Advisory Board and won the 2003 Duke University Employee Service Award for work with Old West Durham Neighborhood Association, Friends of South Ellerbe Creek and Partners Against Crime.

Pamshouseblend started small, with an audience of 100 to 300 visitors a day. The big jump came when she posted on AMERICABlog, a well-known liberal political blog, which in turn linked to her blog. She also is a contributor to the blog Pandagon.

Links from both sites drive significant audience to her site, and now she reaches as many as 3,000 people a day. Pamshouseblend.com also ranks around 350 among the tens of thousands of blogs in the rankings on The Truth Laid Bear's Blogosphere Ecosystem, a widely regarded weblog ranking system.

At first, Spaulding spent a lot of time researching news sites to find material on which to comment. Now she posts more frequently, but does less surfing because her readers send her links to relevant stories.

"The thing about the blogosphere," she says, "is that if you reach one blog's audience, you are likely to extend that thread's reach to a lot more blogs."

Her core group of "blenders" -- people who read and comment every day -- numbers about 20. Some even comment 10 times a day.

"Most of my writing is done between 4 a.m. and 6 a.m. or 10 p.m. and midnight," Spaulding says. She times her releases to come out throughout the day so people will come back to see what's there.

She also wants her blog to be a safe space where people can comment freely. "Race," she says, "is the one third-rail topic on my blog that makes people uncomfortable." She says when it comes to race, people have "silenced themselves with political correctness."

Spaulding wants to break this silence. "I want people to ask the dumb questions about topics they don't know about," she says. And that, she says, is what keeps her readers coming back.