Your thoughts on Community or Hyper Local Blogging

[greenoak]

it sounds so good eborg...i hope you figure it out...........BUT WHY JUST BLOGGING? WHY NOT FACEBOOK AND MESSAGE BOARD AND LINKS AND a CALENDAR..in other words a community.....with all the good parts there.....im thinking my customers arent into reading blogs as much as surfing the web and the speed of facebook.... easy fast and fun would be good goals.......there is so much free out there on the internets it might be hard to find that hook...
.. ...... most meeting places are so narrow..dominated by one person or idea or just reduced to spam...or just a way to guide buyers to a service....or a new expert pontificating......but i guess thats how they get their money ,,,, ...... i would love a platform for a bigger community with lotsof juicy parts.......and it would be nice if it had a message board like here.. with good info and varied conversations.... but with people more in tune with my retail world.....i try to get them here and it doesnt work... andi thnk any business could get and give good stuff n here....
i thought about something like this ...i even put it on facebook and called it vintage indiana...and i love the idea..a place where all kind of related things could be there....and some good talk...but i never worked it out and i think a wider platform would be much better....with a big facebook presence of course.....
. i know i would love to join one in my field!!! ... .... ......i would like a vintage indiana version of your idea or one for a wider group...like vintage junkers and rehabbers....
it could be so BIG...IMHO

[Lyrafire]

eborg--I still like the idea. Using a theme that looks like a newspaper or magazine, why not start it as a regular blog with comments. But instead of it being a one-author blog, let it be a multiple-author blog. VanGogh is right, I believe, in that you need to narrow the field. Trying to be all things to all people right off the bat is too broad. Perhaps start with one topic that many people have opinions on. You can get ideas from "Letters to the Editor" newspaper pages, Huffington Post, and from pop-culture and arts-related sites.

If you write about music, you might make a good editor for a site that allows people to post reviews and other articles of interest to people who love music. By "other articles of interest", I mean profiles of musicians and key figures in the industry, essays that explain why a certain artist--say, Gene Krupa--was a breakthrough artist and so forth. (By the way, have you seen the documentary, "Tom Dowd and the Language of Music"? I love it. I could have married him.)

Later, you could add a section on film review (no--wait--I'm already doing that!), a section devoted to symphonic music, a section devoted to music festivals, a section devoted to other arts, and so forth, until you have organically built it into an interdisciplinary site. Huff Post, for example, started as a political commentary blog--now it includes everything under the sun.

I think I'd refer to it as community blogging, rather than local blogging; too many people will be confused about what you mean by "local."

[Harold Mansfield]

All good points and it actually brings up the problem...with so many options, where to begin? It's definitely something that I will have to put some time into figuring out all of the details and configuration.