Duncan Black, Atrios: "The emergence and growth of 'local blogging' is I think the vital next step...Greensboro, where I was over the weekend, is notable for its thriving blogging community. There are a lot of local bloggers who focus a great degree on local issues, and there's interaction with the local paper and candiates. Greensboro101 is the aggregator, and they're even trying (and succeeding) to sell ads to local businesses."
Mathew Gross: "...The most compelling lesson for me was the reminder that Greensboro really has earned the 'Blogsboro' moniker, and that blogs have helped make this city such a great place to live...Local blogging strikes me as something different (from reading about or discussing interests online, which has little impact on daily life).
"Blogging can often seem like shouting into the wind; here in Greensboro, the wind shouts back, and heckles you from passing cars. People will stop you on the street (or, here in Aycock, on the porch) to challenge you or agree with you or question how much you drank before you sat down to write some post. The conversation flows naturally between the online and the offline world, and as such, I'd have to say that the Greensboro conversation is ultimately deeper than anything happening on a national level. It doesn't have the same reach, of course, but it has a greater depth."
Yes, but...blogging will always be a medium for elitists or hobbyists, for people with the energy and motivation and skill to blog well, and/or the time to read blogs. The way to reach far more people and really make a difference in a community is still email. Perhaps RSS distribution or some other delivery tool yet to be invented will take the place of email eventually, but until then I'm betting that email is still the killer app.
In my (former) neighborhood in Takoma Park, MD, more than half the homeowners and maybe 25 percent of the renters subscribe to a listserv that produces four or five messages a day. (As of this date, there are 249 subscribers in a neighorhood that has 500 housing units.) It's mostly an announcement list that has become an essential resource for anyone who wants to be "in the know," to know what's happening in the neighborhood. It doesn't require that residents blog or read blogs. It doesn't take too much time. I have added a blog component, www.etakoma.com, for those who wish to discuss or pontificate or get to know their neighbors better, but most of the activity still goes on in Takoma Park's more than 50 listsevs. The first step in creating an alternative media of bloggers, I believe, is to network a neighborhood via email. A subset of the email list will create and read blogs.
Neighborhood email lists have political power. They build community in the real world.
Drill Deeper:
- Online Neighborhoods Recreate Village Atmosphere » (update of a piece I wrote for The Washington Post).
- How the Internet is Changing Neighborhoods
- Dangerous Dazzle of Virtual Communities »
Discussion of this topic on other blogs:
