Tuesday, March 20, 2007

Best 25 Regional Blogs

There is a Web site called Sacramento's Top 25, which was one of the first Sacramento-focused sites I found when I first started looking for regional blogs to monitor. What I need today is a list of the Best 25 Regional Blogs.

The editor of the Forum section wants to continue the Blog Watch feature, but without having to monitor more than 300 regional blogs. So he has asked me to produce a list of the 25 blogs most likely to produce copy that would work in a typical Blog Watch article.

The desired blog posts would be short (less than 400 words since the whole column gets less than 800 words in all), well-written and focused on a personal experience with a regional topic. These are guidelines, not rules. A very funny regional post on a national topic isn't out of bounds.

In the next few days, I'm going to research which blogs I used between July 30 and March 18 and come up with my own prediction of where the best written local posts can be expected.

If you have a favorite blog that's regional (see the list; if its regional -- Stockton to the Oregon border, Fairfield to Tahoe -- and not there let me know) add a comment below this post. I'll gather these up and talk about them in the future.

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

Are you going to post the order you chose them in? Just curious...

ipsosacto said...

Haven't decided yet how to sort the info. I know that I've used a couple of blogs more than once. I suppose those might rate higher. And if I get some comments that tout a blog I've used before that would be worth extra credit.

Obviously, limiting the blogs to just 25 isn't going to provide a very representative sample. I am hoping that some arrangement will be found that will restore monitoring of all of the blogs.

Anonymous said...

I was just teasing you, 'cause one time you said you read my blog first.

ipsosacto said...

Well, fine. Just see if I include your blog in the list.

Anonymous said...

*grinning*

Uneasy Rhetoric said...

I won't nominate myself or anything, but I was wondering if you/the Bee would consider monitoring the top 25, but also make sure people can "nominate" a specific post if it is particularly good but outside the scope of your 25. That way you don't have to watch 300+, but you might find something that would have escaped your attention otherwise. Maybe that would be too unwieldy if people nominate at an insane level, but something tells me that won't happen.

ipsosacto said...

Nominating individual blog posts is a fine idea. The person to send those to is Gary Reed, who is the Forum editor of The Sacramento Bee. His email address is greed@sacbee.com

I think I will also put up a form at www.ipsosacto.com/bw, the old Blog Watch page, for those people who don't want to give away their default email address. Should be able to have that done this evening.

ipsosacto said...

I've updated ipsosacto and bloggers and their friends can recommend blog posts for the weekly article in Forum by using the form at www.ipsosacto.com/bw.

If you have a question, contact Gary Reed directly at greed@sacbee.com