Well, it’s been two weeks since our first post and I wanted to give you a little glimpse of what’s happening behind the scenes.
The focus right now has been on slotting great content producers into our editorial calendar for Q1 next year. We’ve spent the bulk of our time sharing our vision with local thought-leaders and getting buy-in for our idea. Based on the conversations I’ve been having, I am feeling very confident that San Diego needs a launch pad for digital creatives and viral content.
Our first goal was to create a directory for San Diego Bloggers which would allow us to centralize San Diego blogs into one wiki-like repository for our community.
The Blogger directory will serve as our collective RSS reader for those interested in reading feeds from San Diego Bloggers. Right now, this is a work in progress. We’ve taken all of the feeds from members in our directory and bundled them in our Google Reader Account for san.diego.blogs@gmail.com.
Secondarily, we are sharing our vision for SDBloggers with guest authors who we think could set the bar for our new digital outpost. We’ve heard great responses from many of you and we want thank you for your willingness to contribute. We look forward to seeing what you can do!
We’ve just outlined the first draft of our content guidelines for guest authors. We want our readers to know the expectations we are setting for all of our writers and have a chance to contribute to the direction of that work.
Lastly, there are a few house cleaning items we’re taking care of on our website. Those are include, but are not limited to the following:
* We want to display Pingbacks – we probably won’t turn on comments yet
* Facebook ‘like’ integration – a necessary evil
* Improve Directory UI – working on scaling and a few design kinks
* Guest Author Box – for guest bloggers
We’re streamlining our outposts. We used to be on Facebook, Twitter, FriendFeed, LinkedIn, MeetUp, Ning, BuddyPress, Disqus etc… it was too much. We’ve paired down to Twitter and MeetUp and that’s about it. Begrudgingly, I think we need to reintroduce Facebook. [Update: I think we are going to stick to Twitter.]
Oh, and I know some of you will be happy to hear the changes we are making to our Twitter profile. We used to retweet every post from every San Diego blogger. While this served us well when we were <100 bloggers, the current workflow doesn’t offer readers or bloggers a lot of value and we’re rethinking what we do there.
I know we’ve been quiet, but as you can see, there’s but quite a bit of behind the scenes activity. We’re still in stealth mode and probably will be for the month of January. Right now we are setting our sights on a mid-February launch.
In closing I’d like to thank everyone for their contributions to our directory and blog. This idea requires a collaborative effort and it wouldn’t be possible without your participation. To that end, if you’d like to get involved with our project on a more official level, here are a few role players we’re looking for:
* Community Manager
* WordPress Developer
* Event Coordinator
That’s the state of our Blogger union in San Diego as of 2010. More to come.
Looking forward to the new year!
