Great to see such a large turnout for the blogger meet-up tonight at Black & Brew in Lakeland. I had to use my fish-eye lens to get everybody in the photo (joke). Actually I couldn't fit everybody in.

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Posting here has been light for a while...I'm just too busy with work. What to do? I thought about shutting the site down, or perhaps just going on hiatus for a while. Need to decide what I want to do.

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I've been traveling quite a bit and working hard as well....and as usual EP has been suffering. Next week is more travel and then it's vacation time. With that said it might be slim-pickings here till 2008.

You've been warned...so maybe see you next year :-)

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Author/Consultant/Marketing-Guru Seth Godin has a new book coming out at the end of the year called Meatball Sundae. You may know Seth from his books like Purple Cow and All Marketers Are Liars. What does this have to do with Polk County? Two things:

1. I'm mentioned in the book :-)
2. My mention is related to the Katherine Harris comment spam issue I dug up last year.

Two friends that received galley copies of the book shared the news with me, for the rest of us, we'll need to wait till the book is released on Dec 27th.

As a refresher, I along with a number of other bloggers were receiving comment spam related to Katherine's run for Senate. The strange thing was all the comments were coming from India.

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Cat and Lorrie are planning a Polk County blogger meet-up this Tuesday night (Nov 27th) in Lakeland at Black 'n Brew. I'm in Lakeland that morning and might hang around the rest of the day to catch this meet-up.

See you there?

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I've been in New York, now Atlanta on somewhat of a vacation, mixed with work. I hope to resume posting next week.

A highlight of the trip to NYC was giving a speech/presentation at the boardroom of the New York Stock Exchange.

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Somebody left a comment to a previous post and addressed me, but I'm not the only writer at EP now. Adam has been contributing for some time and Meredith posts when she has a chance. Nick will be posting soon as well :-)

Want to contribute? Send me an e-mail with some examples of posts that you'd like to share.

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Over on the other blog I posted about some changes in direction. In short, I have accepted a position with Voce Communications, a PR agency in Palo Alto, CA. However, I won't be moving. Much of the work I do is remote, but I do travel a bit.

What does this mean for EP, not much. This site has always been a hobby and will continue to be so. I might actually have a bit more time for it now though. We'll see.

Thanks again for reading.

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I'm happy to say that we have a new blogger joining the staff here at Empirical Polk, and by staff I mean me. Adam Weeks posted his first entry yesterday dealing with the Amoeba threat in Central Florida. You can read a bit more about Adam over here. He plans on contributing from time to time, so give him a warm welcome.

I have one other person that will soon be posting (ahem, you know who you are). I'm always open to having other folks come on board. If you're interesting in blogging here, just e-mail me and let me know what you'd be interested in writing about and provide a sample post or two.

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Real work has kept me rather busy the past few weeks and will for the next few weeks. I've been to Philly, San Francisco, Chicago and have trips to Atlanta, Sarasota, Seattle and Phoenix in the next few weeks.

As such, EP is suffering :-( Hopefully we'll be back to normal posting in a week or two.

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I have a hectic work and travel schedule over the next few days. Posting will be non-existant. See you next week, maybe :-)

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Just a a quick reminder that we're having a local blogger meet-up from 7-9 at Black & Brew in Lakeland. See you there.

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The small (but growing) cadre of Polk-Bloggers is getting together on Monday, July 9th in Lakeland. We'll be meeting at Black and Brew around 7pm for dinner then coffee (or beers).

Chris and Mike (owners of Black and Brew) have agreed to stay open an hour later for us (they normally close at 8pm on Mondays). If you plan on stopping by, leave a comment or e-mail me.

Black and Brew is located at 205 East Main Street, Lakeland...right on Munn Park.

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In a comment on my other blog Ledger reporter and blogger Tom Palmer asked when the Polk County blogging crew planned to get together again.

Good question.

Chuck, Bill, Bob, Billy you up for a meet-up. Perhaps Lakeland this time around? I'm free most nights next week, except for Wednesday.

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Since the article ran on Monday about this blog I've been receiving some interesting e-mails. Mostly it's clueless PR folks that just send me releases without any introduction.

I am proud to say I am a member of the local chapter of the Florida Public Relations Association, and the 'clueless' PR people I refer to above are not members of that organization. FPRA members know better.

With that said, if you want to send me something to highlight on Empirical Polk don't just send me a release, send me a real e-mail that features real communication and conversation. Tell me why you think it would be of interest to my readers. If you can't do that, then don't bother.

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I was in the Florida Keys for a few days, but back now. Posting will resume tomorrow :-)

I took this guy's picture near our hotel room at Hawk's Cay Resort on Duck Key.

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Mark Glaser, who writes the PBS Media Shift blog talks about hyperlocal blogs. Specifically he lists eight things that hyperlocal blogs should do:

1. Serve as a model journalist and cheerlead for others to follow.
2. Ask not what the community can do for you; ask what you can do for the community.
3. Journalism is hard work.
4. Collaborate with and link to other local news outlets.
5. Barter and network in the community to save costs.
6. Meet face-to-face with the community to make a real-world impact.
7. You need a real crowd if you want to do crowdsourced journalism.
8. Take a long view on making the site a profitable endeavor.

You can read the full post to get all the details on these items. From my standpoint I agree with all of them except the last one. EP has never been, and probably never will be about making a profit. That's obviously not the best business model in the world...but that's just it. It's not a business :-)

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It's been fun to watch the number of blogs in Polk County grow over the past year. Shown below is my 'Polk County' folder in my RSS reader. It's not as big as my Tampa, Orlando or Atlanta folders, but it is a growing list. As you can see there are a few that haven't updated in a while (the light brown ones).

Polk County even has a podcast now...granted it's from a traditional media firm.

What I don't include in this mix are the blogs over at PolkVoice. PV has a number of local bloggers, but also a few PR folks that just use it as a place to reprint press releases.

I wonder how things will grow over the next year.

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The little Polk County blogger meet-up is this evening at 8 p.m. at Starbucks in Lakeside Village. See you there.

Update: Chuck, Billy and Vivian have recaps.

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First I was busy, then I was sick.....in any case EP is suffering because of it. Tomorrow, I head out for vacation, so it looks like I'll see you next year.

One more thing.... In the interim I suggest you check out two other local blogs if you haven't already:

- Mama Need Java
- Lakeland Local

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I am in Washington D.C. for the next few days so updates will be light. See you later this week.

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Today marks the first birthday for Empirical Polk. It was one year ago that the first 'official' post went online: My Day as an Election Worker. In that time we've had a total of 398 posts and 286 visitor comments. That averages out to be around 33 posts per month, or about 1 per day. Setting out that was my goal, 1 post per day.

Determining this blog's birthday is somewhat difficult. The first actual posts went online in November of 2005, but they were all housekeeping/technical items. Then the 'launch' happened on Jan 1, 2006 with the aptly titled, Welcome to Empirical Polk. For the historical record though, I'm going to stick with December 6, 2005.

As with any blog, the traffic has slowly built, starting with a handful in early '06 to an average of 100 unique visitors per day today. Along the way we've had some interesting spikes, notably the Brian Doyle case, Katherine's Starbucks habit and that Jelly Belly memo.

I am also proud of the relationship we have with the local media, specifically Barry from the Ledger and Billy from the Tampa Tribune. EP often links to their publications, and from time-to-time they link back. In Winter Haven, the News Chief has a new publisher, so we'll see what 2007 has in store for them

A big thanks to all the readers and supporters. We'll check in again like this in December of 2007.

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After last week's BlogOrlando event I have been traveling. First to Atlanta, now on to Raleigh, NC. EP will be back next week.

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Things are very busy over at the 'real job' so I'll be taking a break for a week or two at EP. See you soon.

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During our period of radio silence, one of our readers jokingly asked us to list our 10 favorite songs. Since we're a user-driven site :-) we'll go ahead and post it. These are in no particular order:

Kitchens of Distinction - Drive That Fast
Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again
DJ Sasha - Xpander
The Verve - Bittersweet Symphony
Joy Division - Love Will Tear Us Apart
Erasure - Supernature
Pet Shop Boys - Two Divided By Zero
Nitzer Ebb - Shame
Meat Beat Manifesto - Now
Janes Addiction - Jane Says

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I'm in Atlanta this week so updates have been sparse, and will continue to be till the weekend.

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Updates to EP will be sparse in the next few days. I'm heading to Palo Alto for New Communications Forum over the next few days. See you in a few.

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This morning at the coffee shop I ran into an old friend, she said that EP was a 'daily read' for her. We're flattered...so welcome our loyal reader :-)

Seriously though, we do have more than one reader. Daily traffic ranges between 125 and 200 unique visitors with close to 300 page views per day. Considering our target market that's pretty good for this little blog.

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This is a blog, so there isn't much privacy :-)

When you comment you must leave a name and a valid e-mail address. Your IP address is logged, but it will not dipslayed publicly. What will we do with the data? Nothing. We won't be providing your e-mail address or any other information to a third-party. If your comment or tip is interesting we might e-mail you directly though.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

You are free:
- to copy, distribute, display, and perform the work
- to make derivative works
- to make commercial use of the work

Under the following conditions:

Attribution You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

All blog posts and comments are the opinions of the authors and commentors respectively.

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Want to contact us? There are a number of ways.

1. You can e-mail us tips@empiricalpolk.com
2. You can comment on a blog post

Want to get more involved with Empirical Polk?

1. You can comment on a blog post
2. You can become an author

How do you become an author?

We're always looking for new people to help out. If you are interested in writing for this blog just e-mail us. Our plan is to invite public officials from around the county to write as well.

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