I live in Kent, Ohio, which is a pretty small community in northeast Ohio, about 20 minutes east of Akron or 45 minutes south of Cleveland. It’s known to many as home to Kent State University (yes, that Kent State, which depending on whom you ask might be “the place where those students got shot in 1970” or “the university that had the pretty good basketball team a couple of years ago”).

I grew up in Kent, and although I didn’t think I would end up living here when I “grew up” that’s pretty much what happened. Now I’m pretty much here for the long haul, since my wife and I bought a great house and don’t plan on ever moving, and our business’s office is in Kent and will have its first full time employee in June. But I digress.

The main point of this entry is to point to a few local information resources for Kentites, and in particular, for Kentites who know, love, and understand the Internet, web technology, blogs, etc. You know who you are.

First, a few days ago a new site called Kent360.com was set up by the new city manager. I’m not normally terribly interested in things like city management, but Dave Ruller has made the idea of city management approachable by blogging about it. I was wondering whether Dave was a fellow geek and had built his own blog site, or if he was using one of the big engines out there. Well, it turns out his site is actually built by one of the other (I think the only other) web companies in Kent, Outstanda. Outstanda (and a few other companies) is run by Ron and Yasir, whom I’ve had the opportunity to get to know in the last year. They’re good guys and we’re partnering on some projects now.

Another good Kent link is the local newspaper, the Record Courier. I’m not terribly impressed with their website’s speed or reliability, but it’s the best (only) place to go for local news.

Finally, there’s the official City of Kent Site. It’s pretty enough and has some nice pictures from around town, but it’s not a very exciting site to visit. Making this information more approachable and making the site more of a dialog than a dry brochure would help get more people to read it, I think (e.g. take note of kent360.com’s approach).

Update: Just found there’s a ton of info in Wikipedia on Kent, Ohio.

By the way, if you’re good with C# and ASP.NET and looking for a job in Kent, send me an email – we’re still looking.