There’s a new trend afoot in Richmond — the gradual coalescence of area bloggers who apparently see a positive potential in building a loosely affiliated community of responsible and independent self-publishers/bloggers.

Ross Catrow’s RVABlogs, a popular web site that functions as an aggregator for 177 local blogs of every strip, has probably done more than anything else to set this trend in motion. For a year-and-a-half it has offered its readers a snapshot-style overview of what’s happening in the Richmond blogosphere at any given moment. Thus it allowed local bloggers who had never met to be able to get to know one another through their work.

On April 7 of this year a dozen or so of these local bloggers met at the Baja Bean for a couple of hours of discussion of ways to act cooperatively at times, if only to throw a party. This informal confab over beer had several bloggers meeting for the first time, face-to-face.

Then the work of Catrow and John Murden to build the community blog concept should be noted, as well. Both of them have established community blogs which they publish (Catrow’s West of the Boulevard News and Murden’s Church Hill People’s News) and then helped others to do the same.

Now there are five such blogs up and running — which includes my effort here. The other two are Hills and Heights and Petersburg People’s News. Soon I expect other community blogs based in other metro area neighborhoods will emerge.

The RVA Blog Carnival, which is being tended mostly by Jason Kenney, the publisher of J’ Notes, is a another part of this trend. Now Kenney is calling for submissions to this week’s carnival; click here to read his most recent post on the topic, or simply to find out what a blog carnival is.

To me this trend is rather exciting, because it falls in line with what has been my lifetime career — such as it has been — in alternative media. Down the road I’ve no doubt the present momentum will deliver more blog aggregators and neighborhood-centric blogs. While I have some notion of where I’d like to see it go, eventually, it would be premature to get into that now.

So for the present it should just be noted that something new is happening in what is now the 400-year-old Richmond, Virginia.

– FTR