Our town is a conservative Midwest metro area not keen on rocking the boat. A series of interviews I did with local managers a few years ago all identified St Louis as a place that was comfortable, hard-working, solidly blue collar.
Our internet start-ups and our biotechnology companies don't rank highly in the nation, and most people on the coasts don't know that any major companies have their headquarters here unless you happen to be talking about a beer.
So we're not early adopters - but the lack of a thriving blog life in St Louis is not a sign of our technology or even our culture - it's a result of geography.
Bet you didn't see that one coming - but it's true. Blogs may be online, but the people who write them need to feel they are part of a community and you cannot create a sustainable community without face-to-face contact.
Thus the riddle of geography in the puzzle of local blog circles. St Louis is divided into cities and townships with very distinctive personalities. The local road and highway structure, while conducive for shuttling people to work and back home on a commute, doesn't work well for creating meeting places that are convenient - and outside of local churches, schools, and the Rotary, bringing diverse groups of people under one roof is an exercise in logistics not easily conquered by any group.
This is not to say that we don't have popular bloggers, or good bloggers, but rather to point out the overall blogger community is very fragmented, with stronger links to national communities than to local ones.
I think we can fix that with the natural rhythms of the area. We just have to become an area saturated with business blogs. Conservative, well-thought out examples of how businesses communicate with their customers, instead of rabid outsiders storming the castle wall.
There are examples of this for civics and politics. There's even a name - Urblogs, for urban blogs.
Our very own Archpundit is featured and named one of the best. What if he could be joined by a dozen corporate blogs from St Louis companies?
If you have examples of companies that are blogging in St Louis, please forward them to me at the e-mail listed on the right side.
