The NC Blog Index Project

Overview: The number of blogs in North Carolina is huge and growing. A list of them is nice, but not that informative. I'd like to put together a user-editable database of NC blogs based on keywords and locations. Anyone should be able to add their blog to the index, and anyone should be able to browse the index.

What: A database of NC blogs, a super-blogroll, with the entry for each blog editable by the blog's owner, and with the ability for any reader to leave a comment on a blog's entry. Each blog will be accompanied by tags that describe the blog and its content, allowing people who use the Blog Index to browse by keyword, starting with a tag cloud (a list where the size of a keyword indicates how many blogs are in the category it names; example).

On the to-do list is to give the user an option to generate an OPML file for all of the blogs in a particular view -- that is, if she clicks on "Politics" in the tag cloud view, the resulting page would have a link to a file she could use to add all of those blogs to her feed reader.

Why: The number of blogs in North Carolina is simply staggering. When I began BlueNC, I knew of a very few of them. In the process of expanding the blogroll, it has become clear that it is too big a job for a simple list—and that's just the blogs that have something to do with politics! NCBlogs aggregates feeds and provides a list, but that list is flat, uncategorized (though it is possible to filter it by region).

How: Anybody can sign up for a free BlueNC account, and anyone with an account can add their blog to the Index—simply click "create content" on the left side of the screen, then click "blogroll item" in the list that appears. Fill in the form, click submit, and that's it. The reason for requiring an account: this is how we make sure that only the person who adds a blog to the index can edit its index entry later.

Once a blog is Indexed, any person can leave a comment (like "this is a great blog!" or "this blog is no longer being updated"). The person who posted the blog in the first place will have the freedom to return to its listing and change things like the blog's URL, feed URL, description, and keywords (just hold on to that email with your BlueNC password).

Where: For now, right here.

This is a work in progress, and some details will probably change before I begin promoting it to a wider audience.