The new faces of the city

On the same morning, downtown blogger Eric Richardson wrote that he and "Kathy," who "just got her bike Tuesday," planned to join a new monthly community ride the next day, while Robert Dean blogged from near Griffith Park that he and a buddy planned to see a couple of bands at Spaceland that night. And from Mount Washington, blogger Heather Schlegel waxed poetic about herself and her city.

"I am in awe at the world," she wrote on her Heathervescent website. "At the wind in the air. The palm tree-lined streets. The feeling of my clutch stick in my leather gloves. The French silk sky with ribbons of pink caramel."

This is the daily face Los Angeles bloggers present to the world, and it is decidedly different from the image forged by decades of television, movie, newspaper, magazine and literary portrayals of the SoCal lifestyle. In this new etherworld, Hollywood, flowering bougainvillea and beaches are augmented by internal landscapes, closely observed neighborhoods, musings on politics or relationships and behind-the-scenes looks at myriad elements of local life.

At www.HotDogSpot.com a "crack team of dogophiles" posts regular updates on its quest for the city's best hot dog. Contributors to www.PreserveLA.com detail efforts to save historic buildings and sites. The past gets rewound on 1947project.blogspot.com, with news events from 1947 written up as though they had just happened. And www.TheAesthetic.com tracks the South Bay arts world.

Together, such blogs are less intentional guides to places than views of a city refracted through intensely personal lenses, giving readers vicarious tours of nooks and crannies they might otherwise miss. Add in the blogs' visual cousins, Web cams, and you can soak up much of the city's dysfunctional, contradictory glory from your computer, whether it's in the Hollywood Hills, the Valley, the far reaches of Orange County or a remote farm in Iowa.

"Blogs comprise a really neat way of discovering L.A. in its complexity