The St. Louis Bloggers Guild is a week old today. I had a chance this afternoon to talk briefly to Dana Loesch, a local blogger (Mamalogues) and former columnist and blogger for STLtoday.com. I wrote about the debut of the Guild in an item last week.

The guild launched with the goal “to promote and protect the work and skills of these bloggers.”

She says the guild is off to a good start, with 14 founding members and applications from 16 other bloggers in the past week, since its launch. She says the organizers have found the project rewarding so far, but a lot of work, saying they are “thinking large and executing small” to start with. Organizers, for example, have started to talk to bloggers in other cities about whether it would be possible to have chapters elsewhere.

Membership in the guild requires an application; the guild is asking for dues of $40 a year, which Loesch says will go toward scholarships for people who can’t afford to pay, for a potential “speakers bureau” budget or toward technical or legal assistance for members if they have issues that the guild could help with.

Loesch says the group wants to be a resources for local bloggers — even supplying mentors to bloggers — and wants any blogger to be able to join and not be prohibited “because they can’t cough up $20 for six months or $40 for a year.”

She says the guild is also relying on a number of tech volunteers who are helping to add features to their site –features that will be helpful to the blogging community, but that she’s not ready to talk about yet.