E-Media Tidbits

JD Lasica Placeblogger.com founder Lisa Williams (left) wants to make it easy to find town-specific bloggers like Jarah Euston (right) of Fresno Famous.

If you're a journalist seeking a take on a particular locale, it often pays to scan blogs focused on that town, such as this one on Albuquerque, N.M. Now, there's a great tool on the way that'll make it easier to track down such so-called "placeblogs."

Placeblogger.com (under construction) is the brainchild of Lisa Williams, who hosts a popular placeblog of her own at H20Town, about goings-on in Watertown, Mass. Williams gave a sneak-peek of the new placeblogger.com site Oct. 5 at the Citizen Media Summit II sponsored by J-Lab and Online News Association.

Among the site's features will be an RSS feed allowing users to aggregate headlines and other content based on geography. Here's an advance look at the site's home page via Williams' Flickr site.

Williams maintains placeblogs are unique sites that are about the "lived experience of a place," rather than the "news" of a place. And their growth is explosive -- 648 at last count.

While she's not so certain about their near-term commercial viability, Williams believes such sites have blossomed because they can be maintained by a relatively small number of consistent contributors. She acknowledges, though, that they may rely heavily on hitting what she characterized as a "demographic hotspot." These often are communities with a population range of 20,000-70,000, which can be economically difficult for mainstream media to cover but which have enough scale to create a natural pool of blog participants.