Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Voices and Volumes - What do You Know About?

Continuing on the local thread, I just accidentally found out about a Denver area Podcaster meetup. It's been around for years. I've searched on "denver podcast" and "boulder podcast" many times before and have not found this site before. I've even poked around on the Meetups page and reviewed more than a few weeks of the upcoming events and not seen anything on this. Only now when I've wandered over to a local seesmicer's blog, have I found out about this event.

Meanwhile, I know about Jeff Pulver's social media breakfast in Boston today. I also have heard other tweetups and social media gatherings in San Francisco, Boston, New York, Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and parts of the UK. All of this makes me ask why?

The only answer that comes to me is that some places have better spokespeople than other places.

Chris Brogan and Jeff Pulver are big connectors, verbal, regular posters on blogs, twitter and video venues - so we all hear about whats going on in Boston, New York & Israel.

San Francisco has its share of big names - Robert Scoble, Loic Lemeur and many others.

The UK has Loudmouthman (Nik Butler) and Phil Campbell and again, many others.

These people are verbal, visible in a global sense, and actively doing stuff. Even if I missed a tweet or two their blogs and videos and various media expressions - and the echoes on other blogs - all make sure I hear about the events that they are part of. In a sense this is the regional elitism that Eric Rice was talking about a while ago. (Yeah, which I said was really the fault of the local folks.)

So the question is, how do we address this? I imagine for people who are plugged into the local networks there is no perceived problem as they know what is going on. But what about the newly transplanted or the newly interested? How do we hook in and and how do we find out about these things. And judging by the varied attendance of some events it seems even the plugged in would benefit from more visibility.

So who do you think of as a voice from the Boulder/Denver area? Am I just not following them? How to do small local areas improve the "volume" of their local news and events so that people find them as easily as I find the "big center" events? Or even so that when I search for such events in Google they come up somewhere towards the top?

2 comments:

Len Edgerly said...

I'd say YOU'RE a voice for Denver/Boulder on Twitter and Seesmic etc., Goldie. Paul Swansen and I are going to try to get some Internauts together again tomorrow for Denver Media Makers at 10 am, Panera Bread, 1330 Grant St., Denver. Can you come? It would be great to meet you in person!

Goldie Katsu said...

Thank you Len. I'm trying to speak louder so it is easier for everyone to find out about meetings and get togethers in Colorado. There is so much going on, but sometimes building the connections is the hard part. Hoping to make this Sunday's Denver Media Maker's meeting