I’ve recently hooked up with ErieBlogs.com’s Mike Richwalsky and his business partner Richard Zmijewski, along with Peter Panepento of GlobalErie.com to help facilitate access for Erie businesses to advertise their wares to the thousands of readers our collective blogs touch.

The first effort of this network is the Erie Observer, a weekly e-mail news blast that lands in your inbox on Wednesdays. The first arrived last week, and readers are getting excited. Mike and Peter agreed to give our P&T community the inside scoop on this new venture:

P&T: The idea of the Erie Observer had to come from somewhere…how did the concept come to life?

Peter: This is something I’ve been wanting to do ever since we started GlobalErie three years ago. I believe that you can’t build a good online community with just a blog or a Web site. You need to be able to reach people in a number of ways — online, through e-mail, and through social networks. And e-mail has been a missing piece for us — largely because I haven’t had the time myself to get this off the ground. The idea of being able to do Erie Observer in partnership with ErieBlogs means we can build a much richer conversation since we’ll be engaging people from both of our audiences. We can pull in people who have relationships with both Web sites and, if we do it well, we can get them to interact more on both sites. It’s about strength in numbers. And it’s also about being able to make the most from limited resources. Neither I, nor Mike and Richard from ErieBlogs, do this full time. So if we can share the load, we can accomplish more.

P&T: How has been the reaction to the Erie Observer since the launch last week?

Mike: Good, so far. We’ve had good reactions via email, a good number of Twitter followers and Facebook fans. Maybe the most important metric is that more people signed up after we sent out the first issue, which means word is spreading. I think it helped for people to get a taste of what we want to do before they subscribed. Now that they’ve seen the first issue, they know what to expect and will sign up.

P&T: Considering all of the different outlets where people in Erie can get news, what niche is the Observer attempting to fill?

Peter: I see Erie Observer as a way to help people organize everything that’s out there. If Tosh.0 tries to chronicle the funniest stuff that’s happening online, Erie Observer strives to point out the best of what’s happening about Erie online. I don’t think we’re competing directly with anyone. In fact, I see it as something that can help these myriad sites stand out from the crowd. If they have have meaningful ideas — hopefully we’ll be able to give them some additional light and drive more traffic to them. People see the Web as a competitive environment, but those who are most successful are those who share.

Mike: I think the email newsletter gives us the ability to dig down deeper into a topic that a regular news outlet can. TV news does 30 seconds on a story – we can do a thousand words and, more importantly – can have an opinion on the topic or talk about what we see as solutions or direction on a particular topic.

P&T: The two top independent Erie news websites are run by people who no longer live in the area. Why do you still do it? Being out of town, are you afraid of losing your “voice”? Why should those still here listen to you guys?

Mike: I still do it because I love Erie. I was born there, grew up there, and came back after college. Thanks to things like the web, Facebook, Twitter and more, I don’t worry about losing my voice. With family and friends still living here, I’m back often enough that I’m still in touch with what’s going on. I think actually being out of Erie is good sometimes because we can more closely see what’s going on (In DC for Peter, Cleveland for me), what’s working and not and take those experiences and relate them to things going on in Erie.

Peter: It’s always been a challenge to write about Erie from afar — but I don’t pretend to be someone who is on the ground in Erie every day. Instead, I really see GlobalErie as a place where we raise questions, start conversations, and give people who care about Erie a voice. For those who aren’t familiar with the site, we started it as a way to give people who have moved from Erie a platform to share ideas and examples of what’s working in their new communities as a way to help bring new ideas to Erie. Our slogan is “Putting Erie’s Brain Drain To Use” — and I hope we are able to accomplish that goal. We can do that from anywhere, actually. The key is making sure we continue to stay connected and that we are upfront about who we are and what we’re about. People should listen to us because good ideas are good ideas — no matter where they’re from. If I see something that’s working in Columbia, Md., and it fits well with Erie, why not share it with those in Erie?

P&T: If there is one community imitative currently or potentially in play locally that needs to get accomplished in the next 18-24 months, in your opinion, what is it and why? Will you use the Observer to wave that flag?

Mike: The biggest initiative: Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs Jobs. Then, create jobs, mix with jobs and bake with more jobs.

It’s the most important thing that the leadership in Erie needs to figure out. Keeping a company like GE in town is important, but they’ve also got to sell Erie as a place where there’s access to transportation, technology, local higher education and lots of fun stuff to do.

Attracting small and medium sized businesses will be key – not only will it keep jobs local, but it may keep some of the brain drain from happening. After all, it happened to me.

I hit a ceiling in my career and the only place to move up and continue to grow, professionally, was in a larger city, in my case, Cleveland. I would love to still be living in Erie or Meadville, honestly, but this was where the job that best suited me was.

We’ll definitely wave the flag for this – our local leaders could learn much by looking south to Pittsburgh to see how they’ve transformed themselves from a manufacturing steel town to one of the upcoming technology corridors in the nation. There’s no reason that we can’t be that. People are already doing it – look at Jim Berlin and the folks at Logistics Plus, we need more businesses and leaders like that.