Sparkle City Blogs

A few weeks ago, Steve over at Sparkle City Blogs letting me know that he was profiling my blog. What SCB does is compile all the local bloggers in the Spartanburg area in an attempt to create a sense of creative community. In fact, I'm very surprised this hadn't already been done, bu therein lies the problem with Spartanburg: the very first steps are one of those elusive in-your-face concepts that seem so simple that they must have already been taken when, in fact, the most certainly have not.

Steve's goal seems to be to create the seem sort of sense of community in Spartanburg that his site promotes. Many, many people, so many in fact that it's the official town motto, complain that there's "nothing to do" in Spartanburg. And while that appears to be the truth, half of the problem lies in communicating those things to do.

For some reason, even in the Information Age, details about anything in or around Spartanburg relies heavily on slight word of mouth, small groups, and cliques as opposed to active advertising. For example, a few art galleries opened up last night and sort of had an unofficial connected art party. Sounds like fun, right? Never saw anything about it. The only reason I know about it is because my co-worker new one of the people opening a gallery.

I know so many people who would have loved to go to that if only they had known about it. An old acquaintance of mine is putting togetherthe Spartanburg Music Expo and he's doing everything he can to get a wider word out there. He's contact radio stations, asked me to write something in the Herald Journal, physically posting flyers all over town. You know, old school.

So Steve's aim is to ignite a community to sort of fulfill the initial mission statement of Hub-Bub's intentions. He's trying to start up an independent newspaper, Spartanburg Spark (coughfor which I would love to writecough) to help see that goal through. I'm very much hoping it succeeds.

Last Wednesday, a blog meet-up was held at Interlude downtown. Four of us showed up, but the enthusiasm and collective optimism caught on like the clap. We all want the same thing and we're very excited to take a stab and this very large undertaking. My only worry is that the slow movement might be discouraging to some. I think if we meet, say, every two weeks, to sort of keep an adreneline shot of why we're doing this alive it would help keep spirits high and develop a concrete plan to go about doing this.

As ever, we'll just have to see. Should be interesting.