Local Community Blogging

I’m sure there aren’t many bloggers in my “hometown” of Flemington, N.J., famous for the Lindbergh trial and a bunch of shopping outlets. If there are any, I don’t know of them. But hopefully, that may change.

Jeff Jarvis and I have been talking about how we could bring his idea of hyperlocal content through Weblogs and and personal publishing to my town, and we took a step closer to potentially making that a reality today. As luck would have it, his company, Advance.net, owns our local newspaper, and he can offer up a lot of access at nj.com, also owned by Advance. So we got together with the editor of the paper and the director of a local walk-in technology center today and talked about how to create a model that other communities might follow.

The concept is really cool, I think. It looks like the first step is to go trolling for bloggers. Once we get things a little more fleshed out, we’re going to publicize the concept in the paper, run training through the center, and provide hosting at nj.com. Then we’ll try to develop some community reporters to bring in video of local events and meetings, and we’re going to think of ways to integrate my school’s television station into the process. We want to do a lot of teaching and training with interested local residents and see if we can build something that might foster community and communications online in various forms. I have no idea where it might end up, but I really like the idea of taking all of this to the public and showing them the potential.

And if there ARE any Flemington bloggers out there…