January 02, 2007
Placeblogger.com launches:
searchable index of local blogs
Snip from Placeblogger.com's "about" page: What's a placeblog? A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism It’s about the lived experience of a place.
Placeblogs are sometimes called "hyperlocal sites" because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail -- and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage. Because of this, many people have associated them with the term "citizen journalism," or journalism done by non-journalists.
Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They're about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn't news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.
Link to Placeblogger.com. If you maintain a "hyperlocal website," and it's not already in the index, you can submit it for consideration here: Link.
Jay Rosen (an advisor to the project) writes about the launch here, and there's a Poynter item by Amy Gahran here. [posted by Xeni Jardin on Boing Boing]
"Lisa Williams' PlaceBlogger launched today. It aggregates blogs that are about the places where the bloggers live. Unlike Steve Johnson's Outside.in, it is hand-assembled and it focuses on bloggers writing about where they live; Outside.in maintains a list of placebloggers but it also aggregates posts about places no matter the location of the people who wrote them. That gives PlaceBlogger a certain intimacy and the potential to seed local communities of bloggers, while Outside.in is better site if you're trying to find everything said about a location. It also means that, especially at the outset, Outside.in has more stuff, while PlaceBlogger feels a bit sparsely populated...so pitch in and add to PlaceBlogger the placeblogs you rely on.
I love the idea both these sites pursue, knitting the virtual with the real, words with dirt." David Weinberger
Posted by jo at January 2, 2007 10:57 AM
