I remember vividly the moment I knew I had arrived in Salem as a public voice. I was checking the online version of my column to see if any readers had posted comments – really just a lesser form of Googling yourself – and was shocked to read a response so debased and off-color that it stopped me in my tracks.

“I know developmentally disabled people that could write better articles then the one I just read,” the kind reader wrote.

Someone hates me, my ideas and my writing, I said to myself as a single tear formed in my left eye.

I stewed for about five minutes until it struck me: Someone hates me, my ideas AND my writing! True fame, dear readers, comes as soon as you’ve got a hater, and mine had finally reared his ugly head.

The mild finger-wagging I do in this column tends to inspire its share of vitriol, that’s no surprise. The real revelation is how civilly the same conversations proceed on the blog I’ve been keeping for a year.

As a trained journalist, I embarked on my blogging project with little confidence that it would accomplish anything. I too believed most blogs were little more than throat-clearing in a room of billions. But one year later I can tell you that I’ve learned as much about Salem from blogging than I have from being out in the community and talking to people.

At its simplest, my blog consists of snapshots of the good life in Salem. It seeks to capture a sense of place through mini-portraits and an occasional rant. It would follow then that such a perspective would attract readers who believe and want the same. That’s a disadvantage of so much media choice – that people tend to seek out voices that jive with their own.

Writing this blog has sure summoned these people out of the woodwork. Nary a day goes by that I don’t receive 1,000-word email essays from individuals who believe, as I do, that the Willamette Valley is Eden on Earth and that Salem, while sometimes a little staid, just needs an image makeover.

These shy readers are the people I call Salem’s “silent majority.” They are people who have lived and loved here their whole lives, who write in to thank me for tooting Salem’s horn. They are people curious about moving to Salem who crave the authenticity of a real person. They all tell me their stories. Some days I feel like one of the Grimm brothers collecting the tales of our time.

But I’m not the only one sending these place-based missives out into the world. If you haven’t been to salemites.com, the aggregate site launched in the past year to collect hundreds of Salem’s blogging voices in one spot, then you’ve missed out on one of the most exciting new developments in this town. Yes, some of these blogs are entirely self-promotional; others skirt dangerously close to functioning as online diaries. Some are so gloriously upbeat about Salem that their writers should be on the payroll of the Chamber of Commerce (I think I should be, too, by the way).

But they all represent people telling Salem stories in ways that haven’t been told before. I may continue to say that Salem has no defining image of its own, but these blogs, taken together, are like pixels creating such a picture.

I’ll always love the thrill of angering a troll – the real pleasures of a free marketplace of ideas where commenters can leave anonymous and angry responses in an important public forum. Bring it on, haters! But Salem’s silent majority has found its voice. The haters are slowly, thankfully, being drowned out.

Glub glub glub.