Meet 4 Hoosier Bloggers Blowing Up Online

You should know your homegrown aces who have taken over the Web. Start with this quartet.

STYLE

Erin Loechner
Design for Mankind
designformankind.com

More than 40,000 readers visit Loechner’s site every day for chirpy commentary on decor, fashion, and art. After The Times of London named the 28-year-old one of the top 50 design bloggers in the world, HGTV hired her to write for its Design Happens blog.

DESIGN

Austin Radcliffe
Things Organized Neatly
thingsorganizedneatly.tumblr.com

Radcliffe, a 25-year-old Herron student, posts tidy object arrangements like mannequin arms and Life Savers for an audience of artistically minded neat freaks. The blog has more than 100,000 followers and has been written up in The New York Times Magazine. When Radcliffe travels, he sprinkles the place with hangtags printed with just his site’s URL.

TEEN WIT

Dan Resler
youtube.com/danrezler

The 18-year-old senior at Hamilton Southeastern High School has more than 6,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, where his clips alternate between fast-talking video diaries and PG-rated hijinks at 100 Acres and other Indy locations. He has a sizeable following in England, though his quirky sense of humor and young–Ira Glass looks appeal mostly to teenage girls, adding up to sometimes 70,000 hits per month when a video goes viral.

GAY RIGHTS

Bil Browning
The Bilerico Project
bilerico.com

The Rachel Maddow crowd also follows Browning, who started blogging about Indy’s LGBT issues in 2004. After he expanded the coverage to a national scope, The Advocate named Bilerico the top political blog of 2009, and The Washington Post called it a “must read” for “rebooting the gay-rights movement in a decentralized, spontaneous, bottom-up way.” Browning now oversees dozens of contributing bloggers around the country.

Photograph courtesy of Erin Loechner

This article originally appeared in the January 2012 issue.