on blogging locally

I was in my local paper this week. Nothing major, my name, a quote, and my picture (a really bad one, thankfully only in the print edition). Last week I took a tour of a new local restaurant currently under construction. I’ve been interviewed for the Baltimore Sun, Frederick Magazine, and a couple more articles in my local papers.

Why in the world would reporters and restaurateurs care about me? Because I blog about the town I live in. About 4 years ago I started a blog about my town. What started as me plinking on the keyboard about my favorite local wing or beer joints for an audience of my friends and family who humored me is now a group blog with 200 plus subscribers and out 30,000 page views a month. Ok so it’s not Techcrunch or Boing Boing numbers, but it still amazes me.

I’m not writing this to toot my own horn. In fact I’m still amazed that reporters call me or people read the blog. The reason that I’m writing this is to encourage you to start a blog about your town. Or if you don’t want to start a blog find one and participate (you’d be amazed, but there is probably someone out there already publishing insider news about your town), connect with your neighbors on Yelp!, or some other local gateway.

Local blogging is a great way to learn about the place you live in. For every nugget of information you publish you will probably learn double from tips or comments from the people reading your site. There has never been a better time to start a blog with multiple free platforms to use. Go ahead and give it a try you may actually learn something or make some new friends.