Citizen Paine | Citizen Journalism

More tools for finding local blogs

Jonathan Dube notes that in addition to Blogdigger Local, a couple other sites let users search for local blogs: Feedmap and Videoblogger Map.

Blogdigger Local: yes; Blogosphere: not there yet

The blogosphere may need to ripen a bit before Blogdigger's new local blog search tool becomes useful. The tool itself has some sweet features, and it seems to have good potential both for the user and advertiser.

To do a search, you must indicate a location (by city or zip), while keywords are optional. I did more than a dozen searches, using small, medium and large cities and a variety of topics from restaurants to sports to gardening.

Here's one of the better search results. I looked for "sports" and "San Francisco, CA" and got this as the third of 99 hits sorted by date (you also can sort by relevancy, which actually might be the better default setting):

May 03, 2005

Brainwagon Radio: A Brief Jaunt To Reno

Where your host finally gets around to recording another podcast detailing his brief weekend trip to Reno. Find out what sports book kind of blows, which ones are okay, and what hotel had rooms overlooking the scenic air conditioner on the roof. You can also find out what I’m doing this weeken...

Tags: General , Audioblogs and Podcasting , Brainwagon Radio

brainwagon [ Feed -         Focus -         Exclude ] by Mark at 10:40 AM

17.4 miles from san francisco, ca - Map It!

This particular blogger posts on many topics (note the "Tags"), including the Oakland A's. OK, so I searched "Sports" and "San Francisco" and found someone interested in the A's. That is cool.

The tags are useful, and I like the Feed, Focus and Exclude options. They're fairly intuitive.

As I said, the results seemed even better when I selected "relevancy" as the default sort.

When I searched on smaller suburban Bay Area communities, I struck out for the most part. Whether the problem is the number of bloggers in those communities or Blogdigger's ability to index them, I don't know.

I do think this tool is one worth watching. It's already gotten the attention of MarketingVOX, blogger Susan Mernit and of  Search Engine Watch,  which notes that you may want to use GeoURL to help search tools locate your blog.