I’m doing research for an essay about hyperlocal blogs like richardhowe.com, and I’d like to hear from people who know of similar blogs that focus deeply on a single place’s culture, politics, and history (the traditional past and moving-target history as it happens). Examples can be single-author blogs or multi-author and be either mostly text or text-and-images like this blog. I’ve never thought about it until now, but is there a national or world directory of  blogs? Huffington Post on its site lists bloggers that feed into its news stream.

I just stopped and Googled “Directory of Blogs,” and came up with some sites like the Best of the Web Blogs, which is organized by category and theme. Rh.com is not on it. Lowell Handmade is listed under the regional category as Local Lowell. Bostonblogs.com has an impressive list of local blogs. Northendwaterfront.com is interesting as a local info site, but it looks more like a bulletin board. There’s a Blog Directory with a ton of listings. There’s blogdirectory.net that is meant for promoting blogs to wider audiences. Bestblogs.org looks like a commercial site, trying to gather blogs as a clearinghouse that attracts ads maybe. None of these strikes me as definitive. My guess is that we are still in the land-rush stage and this blog frontier is dotted with dispersed homesteads, small ranches, modest farms, and two-horse towns.

Richardhowe.com has five direct-access authors, three cross-posting bloggers, several guest writers, a photographer-in-residence, and a large array of active comment-makers, some of whom are semi-regular commentators. If you know of something else like this that compares in the range of topics, depth of knowledge, and longevity, please let me know. I’d like to visit those sites. Thanks.