Parallel Blogverse: How much do you know about the locals?

Internet Irony:

While the internet has the power to connect us to each other from opposite corners of the globe, it also has the power to isolate us from people doing things right in our own back yards.

I was reading Rick’s blog about Twitter “squeezing” yesterday and something in it led me to start Googling my hometown for twitterers. That I hadn’t done this until now shows my complete lack of faith that anyone in this podunk town of mine is clued in enough to know how to check email, much less know anything about Twitter.

Some of you who live in large metropolitan areas like Akron, Ohio or Muncie, Indiana won’t know why my epiphany is such a big deal. Let’s just say I live in a weensy little country town of 39,000. This is the place politicians are describing when they talk about “average Americans.”

I’ve always had this feeling that my town was a black hole of technology. I’ve seen the local commercials that indicate an understanding of the internet circa 1998. The town is a former bustling factory and manufacturing center with jobs that didn’t require high tech skills except for a tiny percentage of managers. And those skills didn’t much require any understanding of the web, web business, or anything more than local intranets used to access employee records.

I figured I was all alone in the real world for a 40-60 mile radius. John Reese’s affiliate manager lives in Indianapolis, as does Brad Callen, and we’ve had one helluva time just connecting outside of the phone and conferences for years!

So a healthy bias against my local area has built up in me to the point that I wouldn’t even have thought to check how many people in my area actually know anything about the web to the extent that I would want to connect with them. This may sound stupid or even elitist, but you have to understand my little town and the people I see on a daily basis.

Let’s just say there aren’t many people taking potato salad to MENSA picnics around here.

What Did My Search Turn Up?

I found something like a parallel universe when I started searching for local people who might have Twitter accounts and then broadened my search to terms to which I wouldn’t normally attach the keyword “richmond indiana.” Lo and behold, I found people!

People in their own little online worlds who, like me, have plunked themselves down on the big web, connecting with people in Banladesh, Hungary, Russia, France, UK, Australia and Costa Rica. Yet it’s like we’re sitting next to each other in library carells completely unaware of our real world proximity to each other.

We are simultaneously connected to everyone on the net but each other. All because of my bias which must certainly be shared in some part by them as well, that no one around here could possibly know more about the internet than email and Myspace.

After living here and being full-time on the web since 2002, I never bothered to really check out my local surroundings for people who might be doing something close to what I’m doing.

Terry Dean Lives ‘Round These Parts

I knew early on that Terry Dean lived in a town close by. We never really connected except for a time when I found a piece of mail addressed to him at the post office on the sorting table in front of the P.O. boxes. It had gotten placed in someone else’s box and they left it out on the table.

At the time I thought this was Universal intervention. A sign. I now had the perfect excuse to get in touch with Terry Dean. The odds of me being at the post office, noticing a piece of mail on a table in front of hundreds of boxes before anyone else picked it up and turned it in… well those are some pretty hefty odds.

And it was at a time when I was small fry and looking for joint ventures for my book, Power Linking. We connected over email, I sent the mail on to him, and that was kind of it. Nothing came out of it other than a wild little story.

Again, local bias and laziness had a hold on me and I just got back online and connected with people in far reaches of the globe instead of in my back yard. (Hey Terry, my biz did a million bucks last year and I have 50,000 subscribers now. Let’s talk!)

It’s like beaming a radio message into space, having it bounce off a large star in a distant galaxy, and 8 years later being received by someone sitting right next to me a 1/2 mile away. Kind of a colossal waste of energy and time.

So I’d like to say “hi” to some local folks I found yesterday. I’m sending a message out into the web space, which will bounce off a server somewhere in Bolivia or the Netherlands, just to communicate with people right here next to me.

Hello guys at Summersault Website Development! A freakin’ blog conference organized by people right here in my town and I didn’t know about it till yesterday. For shame!

What’s up Chris Hardie? Chris is also at Summersault. You can see a pattern developing here already. But wait, there are people outside Summersault!

Evan Agee owns a design shop in Centerville. I could throw a rock from where I live and hit Centerville. According to Evan’s Twitter updates, I am not the only person with an iPhone around here. I’m starting to feel like a real snob by now.

TJ is someone I found through Twitter and his blog has a hilarious article on absurdly funny eHow.com articles. (Warning: mature content. Or immature. Well, I liked it so that should tell you all you need to know.)

Masque doesn’t appear to have a blog, but some funny tweets there. Now that I’ve searched for local Twitter users, I realize that I have a lot more searching and clicking to do. There are a lot of us Hoosiers out there!

I must apologize for my elitist assumptions about my little town’s internet savvy. We still aren’t going to be found playing croquet at MENSA gatherings in the local park anytime soon, but I’m cool with that. I’d never belong to a club that would have me as a member anyway. (Chaplin – no – Groucho Marx, paraphrased)

Long Story Short

If you live in the “sticks” like me, go to Twitter, use your Google toolbar to search “current site” and type in your town and state. You’ll be surprised, or not, to find out how savvy some people in your town are. Connections could be made. Real, not virtual, beers could be shared. You never know until you search!

From Richmond, Indiana?

If you live close enough to the Purina factory to know what brand of dog food they are cooking up just by walking outside in the morning, follow me on Twitter!

Tagged as: local bloggers, local marketing, local search, richmond indiana