This issue came to me last week and it worthy of much thought. In fact it's probably the biggest issue facing those wishing to see blogging take off at a hyperlocal level. In short, those producing the blogs are part of the communities they're writing about so if they write something controversial or unpopular this can affect them personally. We haven't spent much time looking at the dynamics of the local communities which we're looking to network in new ways. I suspect they might be more complex and fragile that we imagined. And someone might get hurt.

Ironically I'm not a fan of websites that aren't traditional news organisations being part of Google News but since Google has decided to open the gates a bit here's a handy guide to getting your site considered for inclusion. Notable that it has to be a team effort.

A slightly more ambitious attempt to collate the "blogs about a specific area" that exist. Directories like this are doomed to failure in the long term but do act as a useful bridge to the creation of communities of interest. <a href="http://onlinejournalismblog.com/2009/08/18/utra-local-blogs-update-and-a-new-local-directory-nutshellorguk/">More about the intentions here</a>.

Will Perrin's 4ip project to jup start local blogs around the country will start to take shape in August when Mike Rawlins of PitsnPots and Nicky Getgood of Digbeth is Good start working for him full time. The means there's now a funded organisation with the job of getting people blogging about their local areas and supporting them in doing so. Never thought I'd see the day.

Give it some text or a link to a web page and it'll try and figure out where it's about. Adding geolocation data to web pages is going to get interesting soon and this is a quick and dirty way to do it.

Jon talks through the process of building a Yahoo Pipe to intelligently aggregate local blogs. Amongst other things this helps answer the question "what are all these local blogs good for?"