Finding the Bloomington Blogosphere

Kudos to the Hoosier Times for the nice redesign and expansion of their local blog directory.

Congratulations to the Hoosier Times online for upgrading and expanding their blog directory. The more such efforts, the better. The Herald-Time‘s Scott Taylor led the redesign, which includes a “blog graveyard” for the content of now-defunct blogs (Courtroom Insider, DeCycles bike ride / High School Confidential, Nick’s Sports Shorts, A Night in West Baden Springs Hotel, Osprey Project, Slugged and Super Bowl XLI). It is nice to see that that content isn’t being yanked down or otherwise discarded, as it is an important part of our local history.

The new finds include:

• Fair Play—coverage of the Monroe County Fair
• HotWire—an extension of the HotWire column, written by Amy’s aunt (Becky Robbins)
• Greenhouse—chronicle of reporter Leora Baude’s attempt to live a little greener
• We Say Soccer, You Say Football—sponsored by Uptown Cafe, about international and local soccer (er, football)
• Auto Racing—reporter Kurt Van Der Dussen writes about my least favorite “sport” (hopefully, not too frequently)
• Quick Hits—coverage of high school sports, often from the actual events
• Harry Potter—presumably a chapter-by-chapter account of the latest book (I’m not looking too closely at this and probably won’t follow it in RSS, since I’m six books behind)
• Mellenblog—a H-T reader fan site, written about a famous Bloomingtonian but not by any
• Left, Right and Centered—doctors Ben Wendell and Cory Franklin do a Crossfire style commentary on politics
• An Invisible City—Geoff Hing looks for stories about Bloomington residents you won’t find in other media
• Monroe County Habitat for Humanity—a blog journal about local HFH efforts

Most of these began with the redesign of the main news site last spring. Some are more active than others. Now, if the H-T would just remove that login requirement to view the rest of the paper, we’d be golden.

The Bloomington Alternative—which is contemplating doing away with their print version—also has a blog directory:

• George Fish—not sure what this is going to be; the only post is a Hoosier rap song
• Sophia Travis—already author of a great personal blog, Pin the Tail, Sophia lends some content to BA, too
• Mylo Roze—local environmentalist and media activist
• Citizen D—Denise Travers continues to follow the aftermath of the Aaron Hall murder, which gained some blogosphere notoriety last month
• Peter Kaczmarczyk—the lone post is about outsourcing at IU

Using the Feed43 tool to make a custom RSS feed from a site that doesn’t offer one, I created a feed for BA that you can add to your RSS reader. It doesn’t do more than list the articles with title and author—you can get more than that by subscribing to the email newsletter—but it does put it in with the rest of the blogs. Likewise, the City website is a good resource for local information. There are pages listing news/documents and events, but no RSS feeds for either. Using Feed43, custom RSS feeds have been created for each (news and events). These should send out new alerts within six hours of any page changes there.

Another resource for regional bloggers is BlogNetNews, an aggregator of political commentary in Indiana (and other places). BlogNetNews is unique in its attempts to create a local community, much like MyBlogLog or BlogExplosion attempts on a broader scale. Sites are ranked and comments are promoted to increase readership among participating blogs. Unfortunately, they are focusing only on political content. They do have a few metro area blog channels, but a request to do the same for Bloomington, Indiana met with no reply. There aren’t many local blogs included, although I did find an aggregator for Democracy for Monroe County through that site.

Although it is still my hope to create a web portal for all of these local blogging efforts, at present the best I can offer is the few we pull on our CommunitySchmunity page. I also have an OPML file containing all of the local blogging feeds I have been able to find. If you load that into an RSS reader, you can pick an choose what you want to keep.

Enjoy!