Welcome to the Hivemind.

“Holy crap! What happened to your site?!”

I’ve received more than a few of these emails in the past few hours, and I suppose I’m to blame for not really explaining how this drastic refurb job came to be.

Some time ago, I was officially invited to join FireEMSBlogs.com, the new home for what are being called the best of the best industry writing on the web. Essentially providing access to our interconnected community of blogs, the new site is designed to serve as a “home base” for news about fire/EMS that’s spread all over the web.

And just how does this affect RaisingLadders, you may ask? Well, it gives me an opportunity to rub shoulders with the big dogs, to paraphrase FireCritic—bloggers with much more experience, exposure, and readership like STATter 911, FireGeezer, HappyMedic, et al. The biggest benefit that I’ll see is increased traffic, because the bloggers who have a lot of eyeballs on their pages each day help drive more readers to those of us in the network who are not-so-famous, myself included.

I encourage everyone to check out the blog network’s homepage and read some of the other blogs listed on the front page—there’s a reason they were chosen by the guys who founded Firehouse.com, and I feel very honored to be included in this group.

Congratulations Chris and Dave for pulling this off! I’ve been eagerly awaiting the launch, and now I’m very excited to see how all this network synergy affects us; we few, we happy few, we band of bloggers…

Enjoy RL v2.0!