Reflections on the Local Blogging Phenomenon: NC Bloggers Just Part of State's Tradition of Honoring, Nurturing Writers

It's not really surprising to me that my native state of North Carolina is getting so much national attention as a leader in the blogging trend. The state has always nurtured and honored its homegrown writers. Go into almost any public library or bookstore, and you will find a display of North Carolina writers. The monthly book club in my home town of Wagram, NC, population 500, was named for a local writer, John Charles McNeil. In my observation and experience, this was far less true in Maryland, or suburban DC, where I lived for many years. Nearly all the attention focused on writers of national renown. Writers in the region identified themselves as WASHINGTON writers, not Virginia writers or Maryland writers. Their perspective was national, if not global. I wasn't even aware of a Virginia Writers Group or a Maryland Writers Group. But North Carolina has a large and thriving writers network -- scribes who identify themselves primarily as North Carolina writers. So it isn't surprising that NC blogger groups are more active and may have more participants per capita than just about anywhere else. Blogshares.com reports 461 NC blogs.

I suppose you could call this parochialism -- an interest in what's local and known rather than life on the grander scale. I suspect it ties into the South's long tradition of storytelling. There's a certain charm and community-building aspect to it. 

• the Triangle Bloggers Meetup (Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill) boasts 80 members.
• the Piedmont Triad Bloggers Meetup (Greensboro, High Point, Winston Salem) started way back in 2002, has had 10 face-to-face meetings, and boasts 78 members
• the Carolina bloggers webring links 33 members
• the Charlotte Blogger Meetup has 26 members

BlogTogether.org keeps track of NC blogging events.

As of this writing, Meet-up says it  has about 7,000 bloggers who've signed up to meet face to face. Here's the break-out for other blogging Meet-ups:

1. Seattle has 333 Meet-up bloggers.
2. New York has 305 Meetup bloggers.
3. Washington, DC metro area boasts nearly 200 bloggers connected with Meetup.

4. Boston Weblogger Meetup Group: 156 Members

5. Cleveland: 143 Meetup bloggers
6. San Francisco: 142 Meetup bloggers
7. Austin: 86 Meetup bloggers
8. Philadelphia: just over 50 Meetup bloggers.

Let's see if the Blogging Meetup trend grows, or if it's just a fad. My hunch is that local blogging will grow into a media phenomenon when there's some merger with local Yahoo groups, which are a much deeper and more widespread phenomenon, as I report in the online neighborhood section of this weblog. In a town of 20,000, it's not unusual to find 50 Yahoo groups -- neighborhood-based, church-based, civic group-based.