floor9.com

2008 is here, and so is my shiny new server. As you’re reading this, there’s a brand-new quad-core Xeon E5310-based server sitting in the Pacific Rack datacenter in LA just waiting to take over. The team at Steadcom, my new host, has been amazing in helping me get everything up and running.  If you’re in need of VPS or dedicated hosting, I can’t recommend them enough.

So what’s going on? For starters, the traffic on both floor9.com and blogHarrisburg.com has been growing steadily throughout 2007. To cover the increased traffic, as well as handle some of my new projects, I needed a bigger server.

And that’s where it gets interesting. blogHarrisburg (and HarrisburgBlogs, as long as we’re counting) is an incredible, powerful domain. It’s memorable. Catchy. Descriptive. Think of it as a verb; blog (about) Harrisburg. Get it? “I blog about politics; I blog politics. You blog about technology; you blog technology. We blog about Harrisburg; we blogHarrisburg.”

Well, *I* think it’s clever.

It’s entirely possible that I’m the only one who is fascinated by the domain. Sure. But I doubt it. In 2007, a handful of us local bloggers came together in downtown Harrisburg and threw around some ideas over a cooler of PBRs and a few bags of tortilla chips. The meeting wasn’t specifically about bH, mind you. It was more of a way for us to finally meet up, talk about what we do, and talk about where we’d like our ideas to take us.

And, yes, it was also an excuse to get together, drink PBRs, and eat a few bags of tortilla chips.

But there was more than that. There was a general consensus that we were part of a community.  At the risk of using the single most over-used cliche of all time, it felt like we were on the tipping point of going to the next level (sorry).  What that level is, exactly, never quite got nailed down.  And it’s been eluding me since I registered the domain name over a cup of coffee with a friend at Coyote Joe’s back in the summer of ’06.

I absolutely hate to use phrases like “alternative media” or “counterculture” because they all carry so much baggage and, unfortunately, tend to set up negative connotations against any blog using them. True, some bloggers are entirely comfortable with those terms — but not everyone is.  So they’re out.  And calling blogHarrisburg an “RSS aggregator” is *technically* true *right this second*.  But it slams the door shut on what the domain has the potential to be.  So … what is it?

First and foremost, blogHarrisburg exists to promote local bloggers. That’s easy enough.  But take a look at sites like the Linglestown Gazette (which covers locale news that might otherwise slip under the radar) or BeyondSecond (providing exposure to local photographers’ views of the city) or DineOutHarrisburg (unbiased, community-driven restaurant reviews) — let alone the other contributors who are solely responsible for taking blogHarrisburg as far as it’s come — and you begin to realize that there’s a far greater community than can be represented by the word “blogs”.

So with the word “community” being thrown around so much, is blogHarrisburg going to become a one-stop source for all videos, photos, audio recordings, blogs, news, bulletins, meetings, events, press releases, directories, and wikis pertaining to Harrisburg?  No.  Never.  Cue the “jack of all trades, master of none” saying.  But this still doesn’t answer the question:

What will blogHarrisburg become?

We’ll be figuring that out soon.  For right now, the closest thing to an answer that I can give is:

“More.”