​With social media like Facebook and Twitter taking over the world, your social life is probably all about your online connections these days. It's that very connectivity, though, that's making traditional blogs lose out.

As we reported back in May, the switch to social media as the preferred online connection led to the demise of GayStLouis.com, an online hub for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender news and events.Tony Bossaller, who ran the site since 1998, told us he hoped someone would pick up the site where he left off.

And someone has, integrating the DIY, crowd-sourcing ethos of social networking into what will hopefully become a central location for all things LGBT in St. Louis.
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Someone needs to blog this!

​The St. Louis blogosphere is officially a little less gay, with the virtual shuttering of GayStLouis.com.

Tony Bossaller has run the site since 1998, an eternity in online terms. The site has grown and changed over the years, beginning as a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community events bulletin board and morphing into its recent blog format when upkeep on the bulletin board format became too expensive. The blog had hosted an events calendar, guide to LGBT-friendly bars and event photos.
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Local independent bookstores have joined together to form an alliance, not just another chain.

​Let it be known that Subterranean Books may be in mortal danger, but it's not going to lay down and die, no sirree. Instead, it's fighting back by forming a superfriends-like coalition with its fellow indie bookstores, the St. Louis Independent Bookstore Alliance.

The Alliance was formed one fateful Tuesday evening (last Tuesday evening, to be precise) over dinner at Pi in the Central West End. Kelly von Plonski of Subterranean, Nikki Furrer of Pudd'nhead Books, Jay Steele of Left Bank Books and Vicki Ervin of Main Street Books in St. Charles all decided to work together to raise the collective profile of St. Louis' independent bookstores. They would produce a map of independent bookstores to be distributed with other tourist information, set up a website listing all the goings-on at bookstores around town and local bestsellers and plan mega-events together.

They also decided to invite every other independent bookstore in St. Louis, both new and used, to take part. So far, several other stores, including Big Sleep Books, Dunaway Books and Hammond's Antiques & Books have agreed to join in.

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​If you haven't checked in over at our main website today, you may not know that Riverfront Times is out with the winners and nominees for our first-annual Web Awards.

In total we honor 100 local bloggers and social-media gurus across 25 categories who make St. Louis as interesting a place online as it is in the here and now -- away from the computer/smart phone.

Special congratulations here at DailyRFT to some of our favorite bloggers/sources, including: Joe Sports Fan; Fired Up! Missouri; St. Louis Activist Hub; John Combest; Show-Me No Hate and Punching Kitty.

​The finalists have been chosen, the party planners are toiling away and the suspense is mounting: Who will be winning one of RFT's first-ever Web Awards?

We're not answering that just yet. (You'll have to stay tuned for the complete list of winners!) But we are ready to introduce our esteemed panel of judges. These guys poured over hundreds of submissions, received from you via the RFT website. They also brainstormed some ideas of their own, developing a list of finalists in 25 categories and ultimately picking a list of worthy winners. Those winners will be feted at a party Wednesday night and announced in this week's paper.

Because this town (and its social-media community in particular) can seem small at times, it's worth noting that, in some cases, you will see ventures on the finalists' list associated with some of our judges. In every case, the judges made a point of recusing themselves from categories where they had a potential conflict.

Without further ado, our judges!

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Political commentator Keith Olbermann took note yesterday of St. Louis' own Jim Hoft, the conservative blogger behind Gateway Pundit.

Olbermann singled out Hoft for his coverage last week following the shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and others in Arizona. Following Olbermann's overly self-congratulatory reflection on his own response to the shooting, the MSNBC host took Hoft to task for citing a fake Facebook page in which suspect Jared Loughner supposedly named Barack Obama and Che Guevara as his heroes.

Olbermann went on to cite Hoft's follow-up coverage three other times during his tirade. See St. Louis Activist Hub for a case-by-case critique of Hoft via Olbermann.

​The votes are in for the RFT's first-ever Web Awards! And while we're not about to tell you who won -- not quite yet, anyway -- we've got the full list of finalists right here.

The winners were nominated by you and chosen by our esteemed panel of judges. We'll be announcing the winners online next Tuesday, as well as in our print edition, so please stay tuned. We'll also have information about our judging panel tomorrow.

In the mean time, congratulations are due to the following fabulous finalists, listed in full after the jump.

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You can't tell, but there's a passage from Of Plymouth Plantation under the brim of Crawford's cap.

​This is, to put it kindly, not an especially exciting time of year to be a journalist. Especially if you cover baseball. So naturally, it's the perfect time for Kansas City Royals blogger Will McDonald to indulge a little fantasy: that former Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Carl Crawford, recently signed by the Boston Red Sox for $142 million, plans to honor his new city and his longstanding love of colonial literature by using some of his astronomical new salary to open an antiquarian bookstore.

McDonald reported on the blog Royals Review that Crawford and his real estate agent were scouting the Boston area for possible locations.

Crawford was no fair-weather fan of the Puritans, McDonald reported.

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Is there a local blog you can't stop reading -- or a Twitter account you delight in following?

​What St. Louis business is using Facebook most effectively? What web site is the spot to read about Missouri's screwed-up politics?

Even if you only dabble in the world of blogs and vlogs, the RFT wants you. We're seeking nominations for Point & Clique -- our first-ever Web Awards. We want to know your go-to sites for food, music and news. We want to know your choice for video of the year and tweet of the year.

Please take the time to nominate anyone (and everyone) you think is worthy with this handy online poll. And stay tuned ... we'll be announcing winners soon!

Last week, a local blogger known as the Hokumburg Goombah, and also as Gig Thurmond, awoke to, like Lord Byron, find himself famous. In blogger terms, this means "when we got home after running errands, visiting a sick friend, and getting dinner, and we checked the counter [yes, it has come to that, we are ashamed to admit], we discovered that we had received nearly a quarter-of-a-million hits in little over two hours!"

The reason for this surge in pageviews: Thurmond rediscovered the oldest known photograph of a human being and Robert Krulwich, an NPR correspondent, discovered Thurmond.

Here's the photo:

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