I pointed this out a few times early in the festival run, but I want to prompt Seattle-area readers or ex-locals to stroll through the amusing doings the various Tableteers got up to over at the Siffblog.

I still need to fix an IE display bug which centers everything, but on the whole I think the experiment worked out well. I think it would be interesting to see Tablet implement something like this as a regular part of their main site design.

A very interesting aspect of getting the blog, um, rolling for them was the relative lack of internet-oriented thinking my friends there have. I asked if they knew what the base traffic of the main site was. This proved to be data that had not ever been sought previously. While I think most of the folks on the Siffblog had a vague idea what a blog was, I don’t believe that they had ever committed their own time to either reading or writing one on a regular basis.

As it happens, yesterday was the one-month anniversary of the blog, and I’m pleased with how it worked out. Never a high traffic site, it still enabled direct, personal writing about the experience of the festival per se.

A few other folks were blogging SIFF as well. Since SIFF draws a dedicated core of pass-holders who can be quite competitive about numbers of films seen, I think next year it would be a really great idea to set up a collaborative blog for passholders as well, possibly scraping film listings from the main SIFF site and allowing the pass holders to riff on that material.

Spatula vs. SIFF runs through June 9, and is (oddly) an audio blog. Being constitutionally averse to multimedia, the content will remain obscure to me for the nonce. But don’t let me stop you!

Artdish did some blog-form previewing, but steers clear of lengthy personal reactions, alas.

Eric at Of Charm and Strange wrote up Sky Blue, Buddy, Open Water, The Five Obstructions, Doppelganger, Touch of Pink, Tamala 2010: A Punk Cat in Space, and Torremolinos ’73. He may have reviewd more, but it’s time for me to move on.

MoviePie has a nice listing, with about 64 films reviewed – just eyeballing, I’d say that they rate films more or less as I did, although I have quibbles with a perfect score for Hero, which I predictably view as imperialist running dog propaganda, if beautiful (that’s a mild joke there folks, and yes I do hope to write about it).

Cinecultist weighed in every now and then with dispatches from one Seattle Maggie, and last but not least, Mena and Me, at a not-long-for this-world radio.weblogs.com URL, took the time to drop some lines on SIFF as well.

In other news, I just shipped a review of SIFF Golden Space Needle Best Film winner Facing Windows – look for it in this Wednesday’s Stranger. More than that I dassen’t say. I did take the opportunity to interview director Ferzan Ozpetek when he was in town. It was my first-ever interview with a non-native English speaker. It included the services of a translator. I think it went well enough, but of course, I can imagine how to improve the experience next time. I don’t have an assignment to use the material yet and thus will keep mum about what we discussed.