Is there a blogging community in Montana ?

I was over at the liberals blog (LITW), and I ran across an interesting blog exchange between Wulfgar and Mark T. Here's the link:

http://www.leftinthewest.com/diary/3519/rehberg-loves-the-limelight-troops-and-veterans-not-so-much


Now, I am familiar with both of them. Years ago Wulfgar figured it out that the 'Troll under his Bridge' was Mark T., and they've never stopped going at each other.


In this post I linked to, it was mentioned that over at Mark T's site, he doesn't have a 'community'


So I started wondering, do any Montana blogs have a community ?


I guess it depends on the size of the community.


Years ago, the Billings Gazette blog 'City Lights' had a community - and if Ed hadn't decided to close up shop, like I did, he'd probably have the biggest blogging community in this 1/2 of the USA.


In '06 when I started up 'What's right in Montana' I'd sometimes attract 100 comments a day - but it wasn't really possible to figure out who was who because I allow anonymous comments.

So just for fun, I went through many pages of LITW posts and comments, broke out a notepad, and started writing.


I've decided that they do have a community over there. Not counting the posters, like Jay Stevens, Matt Singer, Yellowstone Kelly, and the other posters, or moderators, they have a community of about 25 people commenting over there - including myself.


That's not too good, considering that it is 2009, and that Montana has a population of 900,000 plus people. But considering how few people even know about the blogs, it's not bad either.
In the last two weeks since I started up again, I've only had a few comments.


I installed a hit counter, so I can count the lurkers, but all-in-all, the blogosphere is pretty dead.


Will the blogs ever compete with the newspapers? Maybe I guess. Maybe not. What do you think - are we really a legitimate form of media ?