Are you a Placeblogger?

By now, y'all must've read at least one post somewher else about Lisa Williams' Placeblogger site and project...

So I won't go into all the details--you can check it out for yourself...

but you also might want to check out this great writeup in the B'Globe's Business Filter Blog.

Place blogging, IMO, is like the next step out of navel-gazing diary style blogging that's most identified with adolescents. Most placeblogs will reflect some elements of the blogger's personal life, but they will also reflect the community in which the person lives...as well as the things that matter in adulthood: good coffee, property taxes, who said what to whom at the last school board meeting...

These are the things that begin to concern us only when we're done roaming and are settling down and settling in. Let's face it: we all settle down at some point, no matter how many protestations and promises we make to ourselves in young adulthood. We may feel all career driven and everything, but those old vices of hearth and home just grab us by the gonads and make us settle down.

And once settling-down settles in, one must get concerned about one's community--who lives there, who's controlling it, how it's growing, and all that stuff.

Think about this: much handwringing is ofen done over whether or not young people are voting. Voter apathy in young people is *always* and *traditionally* high (with the exception of the '60s, when they were dying en masse)...yet if you did a survey 20 years later of those same apathetic (and perhaps a-theistic) young people, you just might find that many of them have grown a civic back-bone (and some even go back to--perish the thought!--church).

One has to have a *reason* to invest in a community. That reason--whether it's buying a home or having kids or both--then becomes the impetus to pariticpate in the life of the town in which one lives.

Placeblogging is a way of participating in the the new town square of the Internet while still living in one's home town.

And that's just part of being a grownup in a brave new world.