There's something happening in Olympia, Washington. Dr. Rick McKinnon and his band of bloggers have organically built up quite a following for Olyblog, their place blog for Olympia, the capital of Washington state in the USA.
Perhaps Oly's unique mix of legislators, academic, artists and students have combined to make the Olyblog part of the vanguard of placeblogging. I bet they are drawing on Oly's rich heritage of activism and online and offline expression.
Rick and his crew just use "the standard stuff: blog, forums, aggregator, book, etc." on the Bryght Hosted Service and as he notes "It sure does the job for us". They love their site's chat room the ability to show users recent posts, the calendar, the moderated comments feature and the ability to connect the community in a two way fashion.
I love what Olyblog calls their community managers: docents. I hadn't seen the term applied to online community forming and nurturing but I think it works well!
In the process of starting Olyblog and other Drupal sites, Rick's become a true Drupal believer; he's also using Drupal for participatory learning at the courses he teaches at Evergreen State College (does he sleep :-) ? ) and other sites!