Placeblogger: The Many Faces of Local Communities
With so much focus on industry-specific (e.g., the nearly 700 PR-related blogs) and subject-matter-specific blogs (e.g., the 3700+ technology-related blogs), it’s easy to overlook the less flashy, locally-focused sites.
But it’s these sites that we’ll see proliferate in the long run, probably much more so than others. Why? Because local residents will be invested in them and regard them as the true voice of their respective communities.
According to Lisa Williams, who runs H2otown, a community site for Watertown, MA, there are already probably more than 700 placeblogs or "site[s] dedicated to a particular geographical community — a county, town, city, or neighborhood." And to track these placeblogs, Lisa has created Placeblogger.com, which she talked about at today’s J-Lab Citizens Media Summit II.
PR and marketing professionals will also increasingly take note of these local blogs, seeing opportunities to engage one-on-one with members of the community on matters specifically important to them.
(Flickr image of Placeblogger.com from Lisa Williams)
Great resource, I am headed there now
I e-mailed Lisa to find out when the site would launch, and she said there wasn’t a firm date yet, but that it would be soon.
Interesting tool indeed. I hope somebody does the same for Europe, or Belgium for that matter (allow me to be chauvinistic just for once
). Because I have a feeling you might be spot on: locally-focused sites are becoming quite a hit. Over here you already have a number of towns like Ostend (http://blog.oostende.be/) and Ghent (http://www.gentblogt.be/) who have their own so-called city blog. Talking about great tools for targeting your communication…
Hi, all –
Serge is right, placeblogger is just a first step. Right now, the index is mostly sites from North America, since I’m limited by the number of languages I can speak; I can’t identify and verify placeblogs in other places.
However, the endgame — and I don’t know if Placeblogger will be part of it or not — is geotagging. Think the Techno rati of place.
Beyond blogs dedicated to a place, everybody blogs about *some* place sometime. If bloggers had a way to easily geotag their items, we could get instant feeds of “anybody blogging about Atlanta,” say.