Newsbobber's Minnesota Blog Directory

My seed of an idea for an "annotated blogroll" has blossomed into the Minnesota Blog Directory.

The impetus was necessity. When I first started building Newsbobber, I spent a lot of time looking for good Minnesota blogs. I did what I suspect a lot of people do: I perused the blogrolls of bloggers I liked.

I also searched for directories or lists of Minnesota blogs. Initially, the best list I could find was one maintained by City Pages. That list proved daunting and somewhat frustrating. There are hundreds of blogs listed, but the only information provided is the blog's title. That's not much to go on. Plus, many of the links were dead.

Later I discovered the BlogNetNews Minnesota site. This is a solid directory, listing latest posts and popularity data for each blog. But it's limited to political blogs.

Minnesota.com has been building a Minnesota blog directory. It offers a feature of sorting blogs by city. It also lets users see latest posts and the author's blog description.

The Newsbobber directory does more than any other directory I've found. Visitors can peruse blogs by title or topic. They can search for blogs by keyword, author or city. Soon they'll be able to sort blogs by popularity. So if a user wants to find the "best" or "most engaging" blogs in Minnesota, the Newsbobber Minnesota Blog Directory will be the place.

One key feature of the directory is the "detail page" for each blog. The page provides the author's description, latest posts, best recent posts (determined by a web filtering and ranking service called PostRank), latest comments, popularity data, a subscribe button, the author's Twitter feed and links to related sites. For the top Minnesota blogs, I'm planning to add a description written by Newsbobber.

My goal all along has been to build a tool that helps people discover and explore Minnesota blogs. There are many interesting, funny, compelling, weird and informative blogs out there. I'm sure many writers will win a wider audience once it become easier for everyone to find them.

So far, the directory lists about 600 blogs. I've partnered with my work colleague Justin Piehowski, who writes the Minnesota Blog Cabin column for MinnPost, to build the list of blogs.

The directory is a work in progress. We're in the process of categorizing, describing and tagging each blog. But take a peek. I hope you find the directory useful and engaging.