Placeblogging

Robin Hamman in place blog aggregation - how to make it interesting tips us off about about a new aggregation site that will pull together feeds from blogs that are place-specific ... thus answering a question I'm sometime asked: "where can I find interactive web sites about local communities". What's more interesting, he suggests, is aggregation of blogs within a locality .. which placeblogger may or may not do. Robin is working on a project with the BBC and local bloggers in Manchester.

Here's Robin's take:

Lisa Williams has posted an invitation for a sneak peek under the hood of placeblogger, a project she's been working on. Placeblogger will be a searchable directory and aggregator of placeblogs which she explains are:

Placeblogs — sites that focus on geographical communities — are the living laboratory of citizen journalism: they say interesting things about how nonjournalists approach covering a fire, or a town council.

There's a screenshot of the site, currently undergoing development work, on flickr. So will it work? Well, there are already lots of sites out that there agregate placeblogs, GlobalVoicesOnline being my favourite example but there are also tons of national and city blog aggregators like britblog and LondonBloggers (which organises blogs around a tube map).

So would I go to a site like Placeblogger? Maybe to have a look, but I can't imagine that if I lived in a specific city or town in America, I'd really be interested in people in other places blogging about school fetes, a house fire in the neighbourhood, or a scandal involving a local priest. It just wouldn't be relavent to me.

Aggregation is great when it helps people find stuff that's relevant but, in this case, I suspect all the aggregation will do is fill the page with stuff that's exactly the opposite of that - stuff of little interest from places I may or may not have ever heard of before. The directory aspect of it, however, would be of interest to me, particularly if the site allowed me to pull in headlines from JUST the placeblogs in my area, as well as things like feeds for place specific keywords on technorati, local papers, local discussion forums, local email groups, etc.

I guess I'm imagining something like Squidoo's Lens service but where much of the work of building a lens is either done for me already or done collaboratively. I'm looking forward to seeing if placeblogger does any of this stuff or if it misses the mark by focusing too much on multi-place aggregation and not enough on focusing on the local stuff I'm really interested in.

Comments

[Graham Lally]

Aren't local places old-news? I thought we abandoned them in the rush to on-line communities?

;-)

(Seriously though, I imagine there's tough "competition" for this from existing local comms mechanisms. If I want local news (pretty rarely) then I can check the local newspaper or just ask around - many local mailing lists already exist, for example. Robin is probably right - who's this for?)