Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

The once popular news site "The Grand Lake Guardian" is in a coma and according to my source, it's not coming out of it anytime, soon.   "He's gone on to other things" my source said, "He's not done anything in a while." That's for sure.  The topmost post is dated "2008-02-13" which was last year before Valentine's Day.  It's too bad for the area around Lake Merritt, which came to adopt the site in a way, if only because Jim Ratiff, the founder, had collected a group of some of Oakland's most involved Lake citizens. But as happens with blogs from time to time, the people lose interest.  A blog must be updated each day just to keep fresh.  And that's the problem.   Jim's site was more of a website than a blog, which causes more work just to update.  I can see why he may have tired of the whole effort: he used the wrong kind of platform. If you're going to do this you have to make it easy on yoursel

It's one thing to have one writer like me take a break and work on other aspects of a several thousand page site, but it's quite another when a website with a group of writers doens't make a single post but once in three months. I'm writing about The Grand Lake Guardian. Unlike this blog, which is part of a 50-blog network, I never believed the Grand Lake Guardian got much traffic at all, even though it's insider fan(s) objected to this point-of-view. When I checked the traffic using Compete, there wasn't enough activity for it to register stats. On Alexa, the only report was that it ranked 6,944,395 of all websites, but there was no 3 month average for it. What this means is that the site's traffic is so low, it's difficult to register. This blog's part of Blogger, so it's harder for those systems to measure Oakland Focus Traffic. But I can say that the blog is read each day or some posting is -- between 5 times and as many as 200 times a