We take the Connecting People show on the road in the ATL for the IEDC conference. We were asked to present on Tuesday at 2 pm on what Roanoke, Virginia is doing to attract and retain young adults in non-metro areas. We will be Twitter – ing the event throughout the conference.

The creative class guru himself, Richard Florida, will be presenting on Tuesday morning at 9 a.m.

A local firm started by a young professional to help college students with their classes has received $25,000 in funding from Facebook as part of its fbFund competition. Koofers was also Tech Crunched. Congrats Michael!

We see it frequently. Local job seekers not asking for help in their job search process. They are in denial. They think it is the company with the problem, but in fact it may be a flawed search strategy.

Talking Tuezdays attempts to be the AA meeting for job seekers. These fantastic events connects local job seekers to a job search expert.

On Tuesday, October 14 at 12 noon at the WDBJ 7 studios off of Hershberger Rd, Chuck Terrell, Director of Workforce Development at Virginia Western CC will be the keynote speaker.

If you have been unsuccessful in your job search, then come to Talking Tuezday. It will help you get on track.

Gary Cope just created this WordPress aggregator of bloggers in Southwest Virginia called SWVABloggers.com.

Many thanks to Gary for including Connecting People.

It’s extremely important in building our region’s online identity that we have as many people as possible blogging and using new web-based applications. These aggregators like Fwix.com are going to showcase our region to folks around the world. The Internet levels the playing field for rural communities. We cannot change the physical location, but we can shape and influence our digital locations. Sites like SWVABloggers.com helps us position our online image.

The first part of this series received more comments than any other blog post in recent history, so obviously a chord was struck. Thanks for reading and for your comments.

If, and it is a big IF, the merging of MSAs would occur in 2020, then co-branding the region is a second way to promote regionalism.

Of course, this occurred once before through the NewVa brand. The NCTC tech council adopted this as well as a young professional group NewVa Connects, but it just has not caught on. Aric Bopp from the New River Valley Economic Alliance coined RNR - Roanoke and New River Valleys.  He made some window decals like the popular OBX stickers. We referenced this in a blog post in December of 2006.  Having it used the terms since that time, it has a ring to it and it also infers a place for rest and relaxation.

The Roanoke Timescurrently offers special inserts or sections based on where you live. A person in South Roanoke would not receive the NRV Current section and vice versa. There have been attempts to bring pieces to the main page and then drive people to the website to read the entire piece. However, why not just put it all in one paper? There was a recent rant by a NRV columnist giving reasons why NRV should not work with Roanoke. Of course, Roanokers never saw it cause it was not in their version of the paper. Let’s include all parts in one comprehensive section.

Television stationsare the ones who really dictate the region. The Roanoke – Lynchburg television media market is the 67th largest in the US. It includes Roanoke, NRV, Lynchburg, Danville and many other rural parts of Virginia. Currently, three of the four major broadcast networks have their primary locations in Roanoke (the other WSET in Lynchburg). What if one of the four moved to the NRV? That would make a statement.  Certainly all have bureaus, but not headquarters.

What are your thoughts?