Local Blogging

Beer and Blog Salem is not dead. The event last night at the f/stop Fitzgeralds was fun and informative. The web is an incredible communication tool but doesn't come close to face to face dialog. The presentation last night by Ross was about the inner workings of Wordpress, Facebook and Twitter. There was also a discussion about local blogging, how it can be used to bring information to the locals connected in. A big part of the whole deal is content creation. What drives traffic through the internet is new information distributed through sites like google and linked to from social networks. Salemites.com was created based on the principle that connecting local content together we can make a destination for people to learn about what's happening in Salem. This connection of sites will link readers to new sites, more places to explore. Think of each site as an island, with a volcano shooting lava out of the top each time a blog post is written. The lava cools off into the sea and the island becomes bigger. If all the islands are pushed closer together, the tiny land masses can grow into one larger piece of real estate. The key to it all, is the creation of interesting content that is either very well written or has very good relevant information. A combination of both would be preferable. I use this site and eatsalem.com as laboratories to see what subject people are interested in. What are people talking about online and what are they seeking information about. Anyway, it was fun and f/stop Fitzgeralds was a great place to hang out.

Raindrops in my Coffee

The walk to the school bus stop this morning was a bit depressing, except for the fact that I thought of that clever post title. Actually, I don't want to talk about the weather, I really don't want to talk about the weather. there have been a couple of interesting things happening with salemites.com recently. One thing is that the site somehow ended up on stumbleupon.com. It's a site that randomly posts other websites. Stumbleupon.com has lots of readers, maybe tens of thousands. And when salemites.com showed up on there, a couple hundred readers showed up to our site. The statcounter showed 238 "uniques" that day. When I investigated how we got on that site I discovered we were linked in by fellow Salemite Gary J. aka Jugbo on Twitter. Gary is the ukulele player who posts a blog called droll exhaust. I've never met him in person but we've traded tweets and I often read about his life on his site.

I'm always amazed at all the different sites there are out there and what they do. Who would ever have thought that people would want to surf the web through random sites. Because so much of the traffic from stubleupon was from beyond Salem, it wasn't effective in creating new readers. That's OK because more sites are continuing to be added. Recent additions include; http://creativityon.blogspot.com/, http://foodandbooksandstuff.blogspot.com/, and http://www.robmcguire.net/.

If you'd like to add your site to this Salem web ring, send me an email and we will put you on.

Salemites Meetup

Nice to see some of you at the Salemites meetup at the Beanery last night! I enjoyed putting a couple of new faces to names and I especially enjoyed seeing all the old friends again. :)

I've really noticed a lot of changes in the online world here in Salem in the last few months or so. Things are picking up. People are talking. Networking is being done. Events are being planned - and attended (shocking, I know)!

I think we all have a part in that, but I want to especially thank SalemMan for putting this site together where the voice of people living the Salem experience can be heard! Awesome job, SalemMan! You rock!