The Houston Chronicle was knocked offline today when a large area of downtown was without power. As my entry at Houston MetroBlogs states, they were able to get back up through blogging.

It seems that this ‘temporary’ fix might just be the thing to teach them that blogging is the way to go. The sheer number of comments to the news items has to have caught their attention.

While reading through an item about the upcoming smoking ban in Houston, I was even moved to comment the following:

I don’t know – I am sorta torn on this one. On the one hand, I don’t want to inhale all that crud when I am out at a bar with friends. But on the other hand, the one thing I hate about every office building in the city is having to walk through the cloud of death where all the smokers hang out just to get in the building.

Maybe it is better if the stuff stays in the building – at least then it is my choice whether or not I want to go in.

They seem to be getting a lot more interaction with the blog-only website – maybe they should just leave things this way. Of course, then they couldn’t sell cars and Astros on every page.