Congrats to Ashley Burns for being selected as Best Local Blogger over at the Orlando Sentinel!

For those of you who don't know Ashley, he used to be the editor over at UCF Future. Even when I moved away from Orlando for a couple years, I'd read his sports column religiously. It was in the midst of our 0 and forever streak, so it wasn't always kind, but it was always funny as hell, rather truthful, and thoroughly enjoyable. I think he's writing for Axis now occasionally, but I'm not sure.

Anyhow, he has a blog called "Blumpkins for All," and was named best local blogger by the Orlando Sentinel (who shamefully didn't print the name of the blog ;). Ashley's site is generally a brash, offensive stream of lunacy and youtube links that's probably only outdone by his myspace blog. It has traces of the humor you'll remember from the UCF Future days, only completely unhinged. When it's all said and done, it's that level of authenticity that blogging is about and what makes his site stick out from the noise.

"My blog is every thought that crosses my mind regarding sports, pop culture, politics and especially Orlando - completely unedited and uncensored. Everything is 100% original and I apologize for nothing."

Heck yeah. If you haven't subscribed to Ashley's blog, and you aren't easily offended, go check it out.

His win is even more important than it may appear though. The two other finalists were a local radio station and a Sentinel columnist. Turns out, Burnsy (as most folks probably call him) wasn't just rep'n his love for Blumpkins. He was representing the "actual bloggers" category of the contest.

Scott Maxwell is a great columnist, and his Sentinel blog is of similar quality, it just seems rather strange to have a msm journalist who works for the paper be nominated. Heck, if any Sentinel blogger should be nominated, it should be Dave "Get off my lawn!" Ballentine for his outstanding, truthful coverage of the downtown area. I hate those damn birds next to Lake Eola too, Dave.

There are a ton of great bloggers in the area. Lots of folks from Weblogs, Inc, one our blogsmith networks, blog professionally from the region . Then there are local community folks like Josh Hallett, Ryan Price, Mark Baratelli, John Rife -- heck, John Rife took an RV and drove around North America for three months video taping small towns and attractions for FindingAmerica.tv. How about John Frost and the Disney Blog? Erik Hersman's new Roofable or even WhiteAfrican? The guy spoke at TED for crying out loud. And if we're talking orlando blogging, there are a slew of hyperlocal, orlando only, blogs with folks like East Orlando Life, The Other Orlando, and Living Orlando (which is awesome).

Hopefully by next year, we can see a number of the great writers in the area start to be recognized for their efforts. I'm really glad that Burnsy won, as it would have spoken volumes if someone from the MSM won the category instead. "Orlando Sentinel's best local blogger is... ourselves! yay!"

While the social scene of an event allows for friendships to easily develop, the true value of the event was during the unconference itself. I had the pleasure of helping Josh out with the Life/Local track of the event (and with the attendee badges, though, as Jeremy knows, that's tough to call a 'pleasure' ;).

Jim Johnson kicked off our track in the morning with a session on politics. There's so much happening online that campaigns can now take advantage of, and it was really interesting to hear people's impressions of things like transparency and authenticity within the political "industry." It's also cool to contrast national campaigns vs. local leaders and their use of blogs. The readership is of course a bit different, and from the examples given, it'd seem that the more local the political leader, the more authentic the blog felt. I'll be curious to see how politics learns and adapts to this exploding new medium.

Connie Reece was kind enough to join us from Austin, Texas to lead a discussion on meeting people and networking online. Twitter, facebook, linkedin -- all sorts of new tools to allow us to meet new people and manage the contacts we already have. Discussion centered around how to use these tools effectively and maximize their benefits. One of the things that jumped out to me was Connie's comments on how she adds twitter friends -- same way as me, and I'm sure a lot of other folks. If you do not use your "about" space appropriately, and I can't remember the relationship, I'm not likely to add you back. Just food for thought for all you twitterholic's out there ;)

Alicia Dorset led what was probably the strongest conversation of our track on 'Separating your work life from your personal life'. While I had to step out to handle some Emurse business, what I was able to take in was the stuff that unconference's are made of. Quality discussion on sad but true issues like stalking, privacy, work/life issues, employer/employee issues revolving around things like facebook and blogs, and the dangerous, catty world of offline scrapbooking. Who knew Scrapblog isn't just creating a fun product, they are also saving lives. Crazy.

My session on the Local Orlando scene was also something I would consider to be a success. The amount of contribution and participation to the orlando new media/technology community has exploded this year. Florida Creatives has been a growing success, barcamp was huge, blogOrlando was incredibly impressive and coworking as a value based approach to shared workspaces is becoming more and more accepted/encouraged/evangelized. We have a tremendous pool of talent here, and a truckload of creativity that's being expressed in more and more impressive ways. It's falls on us to start bringing people together and creating the relationships that will be required to serve as the base for what has the potential to be an amazing, vibrant community. We're already here, we just need to get to know each other!

Some of the take aways from the local orlando session -- the need for a common local blogroll, a list of everyone's twitter names, events that are more broad (not just technical, not just creative, just events that will allow us to all share in a great experience). I believe it was John Frost who suggested a possible photo walk. A few suggestions were made on possibilties for this -- either Disney, which would be right up John's alley, or working with the History center downtown. They do historic orlando walking tours that would be great and appeal to folks of all backgrounds, not just geeks and creatives. Bust out the nikon's and flood flickr with our "art" ;)

We talked about the effectiveness of sites like Meetup.com for getting together with other likeminded folks in our hood. Upcoming.org also lists events, but isn't nearly as used here in town. Two regular meetup's that you should consider attending are Florida Creatives (Monday, October 15th is the next at Crooked Bayou, downtown) and likemind. Likemind is a morning coffee meetup that is open to anyone of any industry, and is held at B&S Daily Market. The next Orlando likemind will probably be October 20th-ish, but we'll announce once we're sure (checkout likemind.us for more information).

One of the things I wanted to mention, but it escaped me, was Outside.In. Outside.In offers a great opportunity for us to pool together our content. It's not as used as it should be, the conceptually, it's a great site and something folks should look into joining.

We also did a crash course on coworking, similar to the presentation I gave at barcamp. The big difference, of course, is that Alex Hillman from Indy Hall in Philly was able to come be my wingman and answer our questions. From my discussions with Alex over the last year or so, the Philly scene holds a lot in common to the things going on here in Orlando. Many of our issues are the same, so it's been great to have him lend a hand with suggestions and encouragement. The Philly scene spent a solid year, if not a tad more, building community and evangelizing to anyone who would listen -- pretty much exactly what we've been doing down here. It was at the last blogOrlando that I announced our effort to bring coworking to Orlando, and its amazing how much more knowledgable and accepted the idea has become in that time. Coworking is a reflection of the community, an evolutionary step in its development, and I really do think we're on the verge of pulling off something great here in town.

So what did you think? What are the things that we can do right now to make Orlando's scene that much stronger? What events have you enjoyed? What efforts do you participate in? Are you excited by the changes you've seen here in town? Join in the comments below or blog about it on your own site. Tag with "blogorlando", "orlandoscene" and/or "floridacreatives" (which will show up on the floridacreatives.com site).