Creating Community

I’m Whitney, a twenty-something, born and raised Alaskan girl trying to figure out the balance between maintaining my own identity while also being a wife and new mama. I help out with the blogging side of things for local photographer Mitch Kitter at PropagandaAK, and spend a lot of time editing photos and writing posts for my personal lifestyle blog, Life Alaskan Style. I blog about what I love – life with my son Riggs, photography, fashion, getting outside, and cookies (and cakes, and soups…basically lots of food related posts).

Something that has surprised (and excited) me about blogging is the close-knit community that exists in the blogosphere. No matter how different our blogs might be or how far apart we might live from each other, we can find things we have in common and be there to support each other through good times and bad. I have made quite a few real friends during my blogging journey, people that I think about and talk to on a regular basis who are a big part of my life, even though I’ve actually never met them.

Yet despite being a part of this global blogging community, I’ve definitely felt a little bit lonely up here in Alaska at times. I only knew of a handful of other local bloggers, and I was pretty jealous of the bloggers I knew from down-states who were ‘blog-friends’ with literally hundreds of other bloggers from their state or general area.

Slowly I began to hear from other Alaskan bloggers, a recommendation here, and a comment on my own blog there. Soon I began to realize that there were actually quite a few other bloggers in Alaska, and I just hadn’t had a way of finding them (trust me, googling 32 different forms of ‘alaskan blogger’ a couple of times a week does not work). And then I had a brilliant idea – an online database of Alaskan bloggers. Why wasn’t there an online community for Alaskan bloggers? I thought about it for months and let it go to the back burner before I received a comment on my Facebook page from a blogger who was new to Alaska asking me if I knew of any networks that existed for Alaskan bloggers. Suddenly, this became a priority for me and I created the Alaska Blog Network.

This site is in it’s very earliest stages and I’m sure I will be somewhat clumsy with all of this at first. Please feel free to email me with encouragement and suggestions to make this page better!