What about Blogs?

Earlier this year, I began a project that took time and gathered some attention and at the end was challenging.

I was on the search for local (Fort Wayne Area) Blogs and what began as an occasional posting, turned into a nightly feature.

I stopped when I hit 100. I was running out of good, quality blogs. See, there are over 1600 Blogs registered to Fort Wayne on Blogger, yet very few are active.

If you have one that you are no longer using, go ahead and get rid of it. Or better yet use it. Update it at least monthly.

However to start the new year, I am considering an even more ambitious project.

2009 has 366 days. So I am going to feature 366 local websites as an effort to spread the love, to promote what is going on locally, and to encourage us to expand our horizons on line, off line and and as a community.

My list of 366 will feature some of the original 100 that still meet my simple requirements:

• Active, posting at least once a month if it is a blog.
• Local, ties to Metro Fort Wayne.

I will include non-blog websites to keep it interesting. I will take suggestions from you and anyone. I will not limit it to any particluar ideology, but I will not promote hate. There is enough of that garbage on the internet.

You can send me a note if there are some sites you want me to consider to: scott@scloho.net.

And I'll wrap this up with an article from Seth Godin:

Death of the personal blog?

A quick look at the list of the 'top' blogs in the world will show you that almost all of them are written by teams of people. There isn't one in the top 10 that's personal.

The best way to increase your ranking as a blogger is to post very often and to have teams of people doing the work. If that’s your strategy, of course you can’t have it be a solo blog. The strategy for showing up on this list is to have lots and lots of posts, so your tactic needs to be to have a team of people doing the work.

Personal blogs aren't going anywhere, though. There’s a difference between a blog about YOU (I call this a cat blog) and a blog about the reader. Guy Kawasaki’s blog, and my blog for that matter, are not about us, about what we ate yesterday or how great we are. They are about you, the reader.

I guess there's an easy analogy:
Your blog could be like a newspaper (written by a staff)
or it could be like a book (written by an author)

9 times out of 10, newspapers outsell books. No surprise. But they’re different. And we need both.

Who cares that you're not writing a mass market newspaper? The point is not to show up on a list, the point is to start a conversation that spreads, to share ideas and to chronicle your thinking. That's the work of an author, and I think rather than kissing author blogs goodbye, someone should just start a new list.

Here's another article about blogging.