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.

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