This post is for my fellow Southern Californians.  The rest of you can just wish you lived here. ;)

<a href="http://nerdsocal.com">NerdSoCal.com has shaken out its beta stage and is now a fully functional <strike>battlestation</strike> social networking website for Southern California nerds.  The idea is this: this is a website for folks in Southern California to chat about the nerdy things they love but also and more importantly to put together real, face-to-face meetups to do the nerdy things they love together.  So we have forums and blogs and stuff but we also have <strong>event scheduling</strong> software that allows people to advertise "Hey, I've got a board game night going on on Thursdays at this coffeeshop here, come on down!"

We also have user-created groups so that you can use all of NerdSoCal.com's features for your regular biweekly game.  You can use our event scheduling to communicate with each other, use our wikibooks software to collaborate on and archive campaign information, and maybe show off a bit in the forums and blogs.

We're compiling a listing of game stores in southern california with reviews and events being run there.

Membership at NerdSoCal.com is totally free.  At some point we may sell some teeshirts, but using the site is not going to cost anybody anything.

Our intent is to build up a network and community in Southern California so anybody who complains "it's so hard to get a game together" will be <em>lying</em>.  We have shamelessly stolen from <a href="http://nerdnyc.com">nerdNYC, which has had some awesome successes.  I'm really looking forward to meeting new people and getting a vibrant community together out here on the left coast.  See you there!

AWESOME - can you believe that now I'm the one who's jealous? This is great, we've been talking about revamping NerdNYC early next year. I'm going to be stealing some of your ideas.

So, what are you doing to get the word out: online only, word of mouth, stickers, biz cards, flyers, hitting colleges?

Who's next Chicago? Dallas? Atlanta?

Dude, drupal has been my dream come true.  It's everything I wanted out of a code suite.  I can jabber with you on the additional modules I installed to get it to do the things I wanted (groups, events, etc).

As far as promotion goes, I am poking all the online communities I can find and I told every local person I could at GenCon SoCal.  Now I'm relying on networking from our seed members, and I will be putting together some business cards and flyers for game stores.

NerdRTP needs to step up from a little mailing list into something easier for other people to find. ;)

If we get a couple of these sites going, we should talk about getting a NerdCity or somesuch site that can list them.