L.P. Frans Stadium on 7/16/2007 - Hickory, North Carolina

I was browsing a friend's blog yesterday when I came across his article about a rather new concept in social networking.  I have dabbled a little myself in this concept with accounts on FaceBook and MySpace.  Both of those sites don't really interest me much at all.  My friends network isn't large enough to need an online website to keep up with them.  What does interest me is online communities where specific and common interests are the themes.  I particularly enjoy photography related communities.  FaceBook and MySpace don't lend themselves well to this concept.  Those communities seem to be dominated by the high school and younger generations.  It's all about bling and me, neither of which interest an old fart like me very much.  After I read Jason's article, I decided to go check it out to see what they had to offer.

After playing around on the site a little, I made one determination.  Ning.com offers a very advanced version of Yahoo, Google, and MSN Groups.  These three giants all offer free group sites where people can get together and collaborate on whatever issue is at hand.  The feature set on most of those seems lacking though, especially for photography-related themes.  As I explored more, I decided to create a network of my own. 

North Carolina Photographers

This will be a bit of an experiment over time probably.  I don't know how many photographers in North Carolina are interested in a networking site, or if there will even be enough activity to make it worthwhile.  The site allows users to post photos, so photo discussion could be interesting.  The network is very configurable.  I have created several discussion forums where specific topics may be discussed.  I can expand that if I want to, or trim it down. 

If you are a photographer in North Carolina, you may want to give it a try!

Today is the Fourth of July. I really shouldn't be messing around with this. I don't have much of anything to do today except for a Hickory Crawdads baseball game at 7pm. I write a separate blog for Hickory Crawdads baseball. If you are interested in taking a look at that, it's HERE or you can hit the Hickory Crawdads link in the blogroll menu on the left.

Please excuse my mess here while I re-develop my website into something that is more friendly and content-oriented.  During the next few weeks, I'll have everything back up and functioning normally with some new and improved bells and whistles.   I have been using WordPress to manage my blog for quite some time now.  As I have learned the capabilities of this application, I believe that it will manage my website and content perfectly.  Please bear with me while I move my data into the new site...