Knoxville blog aggregator


We’re rolling out an area blog aggregator on knoxnews.com at blognetwork.knoxnews.com. Take a look and let us know what you think.

We’re doing it with Dave Mastio’s BlogNetNews.com. Mastio, who went full with his blog aggregator firm this month, was running it part-time while holding down a day job as an editorial writer for The Virginian-Pilot.

He’s also been an editorial writer for USA Today and a speech writer for the Bush administration. He’s written for National Review, The Weekly Standard and The Washington Monthly. And along the way, he developed the idea for a pretty slick Web service.

In an email, Mastio explains his concept this way:

BNN was built to fill three needs: 1) So bloggers can get a quick view of what’s going on in their neighborhood of the blogosphere more quickly finding what’s new and worth commenting on. 2) So blog readers can more efficiently see when their favorites have something new or check out new blogs when they are driving the conversation. 3) to make it easier for new blog readers to understand the local blogosphere and find the blogs they like. By only posting snippets of new blog posts the site should become a source of new traffic for bloggers.

We do this with a bunch of features:

  1. The day’s top news links  – based solely on what news stories local Knoxville bloggers are linking to – no matter what mainstream news source they’re in. (hover your cursor over the links and “tool tip” will pop up telling you which blogs linked to the story most recently.)
  2.  A local blog search engine which you can also host on your site. (https://blognetwork.knoxnews.com/searchtool.php)
  3. A quick guide to the hottest blog comment sections in the Knoxville-centric blogosphere (still being fine-tuned a bit).
  4. A quick index of the Knoxville area blogs with the most new posts today.
  5. A guide to the Knox blogs most linked to by other Knox bloggers this week. (again hover and you’ll find out the latest blogs to link)

The last feature is called the Knoxville Blogwire and let’s bloggers host a constantly updating sidebar with links to the latest 10 posts from around Knoxville. Code to add that is here: https://blognetwork.knoxnews.com/add-bnn.php (will be fully functional this weekend)

See example below:

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