As people begin to depend more and more on the Internet to narrow down where they want to live and visit, pictures become more and more important.
The Roanoke Times, the local paper of Roanoke,Virginia, has what they call a local Blog Roll of people who write about the area. Their list of local Roanoke area bloggers is a good way to get a snap shot of the area.
While there are bloggers that are focused on an issue or a particular aspect of modern life, there are people who blog about a particular area.
Besides my View from the Mountain in the list of Roanoke bloggers, there is Fred First, who does Fragments from Floyd and Doug Thompson's Blue Ridge Muse. Down on the North Carolina coast, I found Mary Warshaw's Beaufort Blog.
In Northern Virginia, I found Reston Backfence, a community oriented online newspaper that has a list of blogs. Since Reston is Silicon Valley East, the list has 71 blogs and some that are just pictures. My Reston Blog is buried on page ten or eleven.
I often get comments or notes from others about posts that I have done being helpful to people moving to an area. I have gotten a number of people who moved to Roanoke writing me to say thanks for the local information.
I have had people moving to Mount Airy, NC write and say that my posts about that area have also been helpful. I have also had readers of my Coastal NC blog write to say that have enjoyed the information before a move.
The question becomes how does anyone find these little stores of information. Most often it is through a Google search. I have postulated that Google fills in some of the cracks in local information that we have lost because we are such a mobile society.
In fact I did a post about Google being the glue that holds modern society together.
I actually think we are blessed with so much information. If you are consumer today, and you cannot find out something about an area before you get there, you must not want to know because it is all out there for you to find.
If I search for pictures of Roanoke, Virginia one of my sites is on the first page of results, and I haven't worked on getting a higher ranking because I don't sell real estate in Roanoke.
However, if you search for pictures of the Southern Outer Banks, I have a site that comes up second in the search results.
I am selling property on the Southern Outer Banks. I am also trying to provide new comers to the area with information that reflects my personal views whether it is about restaurants or the weather.
I guess enjoying writing and photography is my edge in helping people find me and in convincing them that I know what I am talking about when it comes to the Crystal Coast of North Carolina. I get a tremendous amount of traffic from my Flickr and Picasa Web Albums sites.
Maybe I'll pick up some coastal cat lovers from my latest posts to Flickr.
Hopefully in the end when people come to the sites where I am selling particular houses like the one at 126 White Heron Lane in my own Bluewater Cove neighborhood or the nice waterfront coastal cottage at 290 Rollingwood near Cape Carteret, they will be able to get a feel for the area easily and quickly from my online sites.
I know that web photo albums like my boating trip to Shackleford Banks, near Beaufort, NC and my one of the Roanoke, Virginia Farmers' Market do a very good job of showing an area to prospective visitors and buyers.
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