Stuart Mease of the City of Roanoke and Roanoke Biz2Biz organized a terrific workshop on bloggers and blogging yesterday. I was invited to speak there, along with folks like Pat Matthews, Tom Markiewicz, and Keith Clinton. Many of the attendees were people trying to learn more about blogging and whether or not it would be something useful for their business or organization. The workshop was exactly the kind of thing that every economic development organization in the country ought to be doing for local businesses, and Biz2Biz and Mease get kudos for getting it done.
Biz2Biz has started a terrific blog on local business and community activities. One of the things they will do is help distribute press releases from local companies, which are often ignored by traditional media outlets, who don't have a way to put much business news into traditional radio, TV, and print formats. Not everyone will read them, but by creating a central location online for them, they get indexed by the search engines more effectively if someone is looking for something specific.
Most interesting fact to come out of the meeting: a local blogger, who started blogging while a full time mom, has leveraged her writing into a full time job with Yahoo! Roanoke's Sleepy Blogger learned the tools of this new medium and turned it into a job. And while it is just one data point, there are many more like it. And no, these kinds of folks and business opportunities never show up on the radar of most economic development organizations. New jobs are being created and filled every day, and most economic developers don't know.