Our friend Mike Knutson over at Reimagine Rural saw our post about Jim Thorpe, and this got him thinking about a recent post he made about third places.  Third places are those hot spots in your community where you can share ideas, such as coffee shops.  Mike goes into detail about the characteristics of third places here.  Third places are neutral ground,  accessible and accommodating, and are places where you can routinely run into regulars.   In case you are wondering, the first place is your home and second place is your work.

How important are third places to you?  Should we make a special effort to design communities with third places?

Art Walk in Hillsborough, NC

Smallwander.com is hosting it’s monthly teleconference this upcoming Monday, Nov 24, from 10 to 11 am.  The topic is “Do downtown promotions = dollars downtown?

I particularly would like to explore why Hillsborough NC’s recent “Ladies Night Out” promotion was successful.  On a rainy Thursday night, hordes of women descended on the town and bought like crazy in the shops.  If you have similar stories about how special events translate to dollars in the shops, please think about them beforehand and share them with us.

Panelists will include Amy Wilmoth, a freelance marketing consultant for small businesses in the Triangle area of North Carolina, Elizabeth Read, Executive Director of the Alliance for Historic Hillsborough, Eddie Ide, President of Newton Merchants, Inc. of Newton North Carolina, and Greta Lint, tourism consultant.

We will be inviting town representatives in our smallwander network.  People will be able to either call in via telephone or listen in over the web.  They can also type questions to us.

Flip video camera

Did you know you can stream live video over the web for free these days?

Did you know you can, in fact, stream live video from your phone?

Did you know a Wall Street Journal blogger posts videos captured from a $200 camcorder?  (And the price has dropped significantly since then.)

These are just a few of the things I learned at this year’s Converge South conference.

Call in on Monday morning (Oct 27) at 10 am to participate in a conversation about some of the new tools that are using to build communities on the web and beyond.  Hear more about Twitter, Facebook, blogging, and other social media.

I’ve invited a few bloggers and techies who I met at the conference, including Wayne Sutton and Ginny Skalski at 30threads.  These folks are experts at creating news and information networks.  They administer the mync.com site.

Robert Scoble, a world-reknowned tech and social media geek, was at the conference to show us how he is using video to get the message across these days.  Although Robert won’t be on the call, we’ll be passing on a lot of what he shared with us.

Our next smallwander.com seminar will be an open discussion about planning special seasonal events in small towns.  With the holiday season approaching, many towns plan Christmas parades and home tours.  How important are they for your downtown?  Share your experiences with other downtown managers and tourist officers who are hoping to initiate these types of events.

Although I have no children of my own, I have traveled with my nieces to far-off places.  Things occurred.  One time, as I tried to keep an eye on my sister’s 2-year-old in the airport lobby, the child trained her eye on another traveler’s sleeve of french fries.  Fixating on the prize, her heart slowed to just a few beats-per-minute as she shifted into predator mode and moved forward.  I attempted to block her path, all the while claiming I had no experience with this sort of thing to the embarrassed frie-eater.

If I had known of Mom Most Traveled, I could have picked up some tips on keeping the kid occupied before things degenerated into unpleasantness.

Download interview with Mom Most Traveled.

Subscribe to podcast in Itunes.

Our next smallwander.com phone/web seminar will be on a closed-circuit Skype call this Monday, August 25.  However, you will be able to catch the podcast by downloading it from this blog, if I handle the technology of recording it OK.

Our guest will be the proprietor of Mom Most Traveled.   Her blog discusses all things about traveling with small children and living with them in foreign lands that are not necessarily kid-friendly.  Pick up some valuable tips from the podcast, once it’s posted.

We’ll go back to the call-in format for our next seminar on September 29.  Our seminars are always on the last Monday of the month at 10 am.  Subscribe to this blog for updates.

Leon Tongret and Greta Lint discuss how buying locally helps small towns.

Download

Subscribe to podcast in Itunes.

This is the first podcast of our monthly teleseminar series. This seminar was held on January 28, 2008. Our guest was Carol Wiersma of the Mississippi Valley Partnership. We discussed the value of creating travel partnerships among communities.

Click here to download the MP3 file.

Click here to subscribe to the podcast on Itunes.

The next Smallwander.com web/phone seminar will be next Monday, March 31, at 10 am. It’s going to be all about blogging, and other social networking tools. Our featured guest will be Anne-Marie Dany, publisher of the blog MyWeaverville.com. Anne-Marie also happens to be our Smallwander representative from Weaverville, NC.

Blogs, or web logs, are online electronic journals. Businesses are using blogs to build a personal relationship with their clients. Towns as a whole can do the same to attract tourists. As you might know, smallwander.com has two blogs, one to help towns communicate with one another, and one to communicate with travelers.  Right now, smallwander.com members are welcome to post on both blogs.

 We are inviting all of our featured towns on smallwander.com the ability to post on this blog. They’ll be able to post and edit their own messages directly, without any review on our part. We currently use a Wordpress blog hosted on Wordpress.com. Eventually, we’ll migrate the blog over to our upgraded site.

To our member towns–if you are new to blogging, experiment with it! It’s not much harder than sending out an email, except that it’s posted out there for the internet world to see. You’ll be able to add pictures, video, and audio, too. This might be your first step in setting up your own blog for your town. In fact, our next phone/web seminar, on March 31, 10 am, will be all about blogging. More details to follow.

I’m learning about this at the same time as you, so, we’re always open to suggestions. Please contact us at any time if you have any problems.