Promote your business blog! (applying "A Pattern Language" to locate complementary "places" in a virtual world)

There is a local blogger who calls herself the Goddess of Garey Avenue (Garey Avenue being the main north-south thoroughfare in the city of Pomona - geddit?). Earlier this month, she wrote a post entitled At Night in Pomona which quoted extensively from a book called A Pattern Language. Here are some excerpts from her excerpts:

2. If evening activities such as movies, cafes, ice cream parlors, gas stations, and bars are scattered throughout the community, each one by itself cannot generate enough attraction....

6. It is difficult to estimate the exact number of night spots that need to be grouped to create a sense of night life. From observation, we guess that it takes about six, minimum.

7. On the other hand, massive evening centers, combining evening services which a person could not possibly use in the same night, are alienating. For example, in New York the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts makes a big splash at night, but it makes no sense. No one is going to the ballet and the theater and a concert during one night on the town. And centralizing these places robs the city as a whole of several centers of night life.

All these arguments together suggest small, scattered centers of mutually enlivening night spots, the services grouped to form cheery squares, with lights and places to loiter, where people can spend several hours in an interesting way.

The theory makes sense. How many times have you gone to a place (for example, Downtown Disney in Anaheim, California) which features several different establishments that you can visit? Even the modern mall is an example of this - people are more inclined to "go to the mall" than to go to a particular store in the mall. As long as the different establishments are complementary, this will work. It won't work, however, with non-complementary businesses - a gas station, a four-star restaurant, and Westboro Baptist Church do not a destination make.

But can you create such complementary destinations in the virtual world? Of course.

Within the next hour, my Empoprise-IE Inland Empire blog will contain a post that will explain how I discovered the Goddess of Garey Avenue in the first place. You see, the Original Skrip blog contains, in its upper right hand corner, a list of blogs "around town." The rationale is that if you're interested in the local blog Original Skrip, you may be interested in other local blogs (such as Empoprise-IE and Goddess of Garey Avenue) that also have a local slant. In fact, if you look at some of these blogs, you'll see that they cross-reference each other extensively. My own Empoprise-IE blog hasn't been doing much of this lately, but I'm trying to improve my performance there in the future.

Why? Self-preservation.

In fact, it's a lesson that I can carry to all of my blogs, including this one. Now certainly the posts in this blog reference posts in other blogs on numerous occasions, but I haven't made a conscious effort to insert this blog into an ecosystem of similar business blogs.

This is where you come in. If you write a business blog that you think is somewhat complementary to Empoprise-BI, tell us all about it in the comments.