In 2007 Brian Russell, Anton Zuiker, Jackson Fox, myself and a few more individuals were talking about how we needed a single source to track all of the technology events in the Triangle. For those of you who are not familiar with the area, the Triangle stands for Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, and surrounding communities. Our problem was that we would miss a meetup or local confernece and there wasn’t a good way of letting others know about upcoming events being held locally. Thus Brian created a google calendar and I registered the domain name SocialCarolina.org and SocialCarolina.com, built the website and embeded the google calendar and thus SocialCarolina.org, Connecting the Community to the events was launched.
Soon after I installed a WordPress blog at the url SocialCarolina.com/blog and we started sending out events to guest post and add events to the calendar. A few months later Viget launched Refresh The Triangle and included the SocialCarolin.org calendar and we were on our way. Over time we expanded our Triangle reach to Charlotte and Greensboro, NC with a few guest blog post and events added to the calendar and now we we have around thirty individuals adding various events. Some events are blogger meetups, tweetups, startup drinks, entrepreneur meetups, ruby, java, drupel meetups, social media talks and more. But it seems due to everyone including myself working on various projects, we have found little time to blog about upcoming events or posting recaps of past events on SocialCarolian.org. Therefore I have removed the blog and redirected the blog link pointing to my site to the North Carolina category we’re I’ll post about events, technology and people in NC. Besides blogging about events in the Triangle another plan for the SocialCaroliana.org website was to have a job board. We’ll that never took off but I talked to Greg Hyer of http://www.linkingraleighnc.com who runs a successful job board on his site, therefore I’m going to link to it for the jobs link.
The ultimate goal of SocialCarolina.com was to create our own, “TechCrunch” like site covering NC. Maybe the timing was off or I was a little to early to the game. It was 2007 when we started the site before the “social” became super popular and overused with the phase “social media”. Regardless, we’ll keep the calendar updated as much as posssible and if you would like to have your event added to the site email: events at socialcarolina dot org or follow us on twitter as @RDCH and send us a tweet. We do have a facebook group and an email mailing list where we send out messages about upcoming events in the area.
For those who contributed to the blog, calendar or have continue to help promote this awesome technology / social media community we have in North Carolina. Thank You!
Wayne Sutton
