Blogs have become so widespread and cover so many topics that all journalists should be keeping an eye on them. Here are a few tools to help you find local bloggers so you can monitor what they’re saying in your community. If you follow the best ones, you’re bound to find some great story ideas.
Blogdigger
Blogdigger is a Weblog search engine that recently rolled out a new local search feature (http://local.blogdigger.com) that helps you find blogs by geographic location. It’s easy to use. Simply enter the location (city/state or zip code) in the “Where” box to find recent posts from that area. You can also add a keyword or phrase in the optional “What” field to narrow your search.
The initial verison of Blogdigger Local supports more than 50,000 U.S. cities and zip codes and will continue to expand. The city/zip searches don’t include other countries right now, but if you want to search outside of the U.S., you can use the Blogdigger Local Advanced Search form and enter your latitude/longitude coordinates.
You can view the results page on the Blogdigger Local site, or subscribe to an RSS feed of the latest posts so that you will automatically be alerted to new posts from your area of interest (see my column on RSS for Journalists for more information about using RSS).
FeedMap
FeedMap (http://www.csthota.com/blogmap) enables you to search and browse blogs by location. The only blogs included in here are ones that individuals have entered. Anyone can geo-code their blog and enter it, and once they do so they get a “BlogMap” to put on their site.
Here, for example, are bloggers in my neighborhood.
Videoblogger Map
This is a map of videobloggers around the world (http://www.videoblogging.info/map/index.php). Click on the dots to go to individual blogs. There aren’t very many on here, but it’s a nice approach and could be handy as more are added.
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