Dipping into the Blogpond

I am a newcomer to blogging, and have only recently set up an RSS reader (Google Reader, which does the job for me). I have very quickly grown to a list of 25 subscriptions & I fear I’m becoming a bit of a blog junkie. But everybody’s content seems so interesting.

What has struck me however, is the difficulty in tracking down local blogs, or searching just for local content. With so many blogs being hosted on Blogger and WordPress or cheaper .com domains (depending on where they are hosted) they would rarely come up on a Google search for “Australia only”. Google’s Australian Blogsearch doesn’t seem any better at finding localised content, but just searches all blogs. For example if I want to see what people are writing about “Fairfax”, I don’t want to wade through all the entries relating to Fairfax County in Virginia. Gnoos Australian Blog search does a far superior job of filtering for local content.

Wouldn’t it be good if we had a good quality Australian blog hosting/blog search site where we could network locally. I qualify that in saying that yes, we do have blog hosting sites, and we do have a couple of pretty good local blog search sites (Gnoos as mentioned and the Australian Index). But these don’t do much for networking (a la Bloglog), as we’ve come to expect it.

I did come across a website called Blogsearch.com.au which announces that they will be launching soon. This site has been optimised to the max, but is merely offering links to sponsored listings at this stage – not sure if it’s actually going to do anything.

It will be an interesting space to watch. I’d love to get involved in such a project, but resources won’t permit at this stage.