(Re)Building a blog network.

[Matt Neznanski]

Oregon bloggers have been benefiting from a site called ORBlogs since 2003, an aggregator that allowed bloggers to be listed and promote content and gave readers a chance to find them by location or popularity.
ORBlogs founder (who had a hand in creating code for the original Blogger software) Paul Bausch said it was just getting to be too much for one person to handle and is throwing in the towel:

When I started ORblogs in March 2003, there weren't many good ways to find bloggers living in a particular area. And because I had recently moved to Corvallis, I wanted to learn what I could from people living near me. The site personally put me in touch with bloggers across the state, taught me a lot about Oregon and its cities (including Corvallis), and I hope the site did the same for others. I feel ORblogs served an important role for Oregon blogging by gathering independent voices across all spectrums into one place where everyone shared a common geography.

Indeed it did.
At any rate, there's a grassroots effort to revive the site (with Paul's help) from a range of folks (including me) who recognize what ORBlogs meant to the statewide community of bloggers. Thank Twitter and the existing network for spreading the word so fast.
I've been reading Jason Kristufek's thoughts on how to move forward on a digital-only newspaper site and I've been trying to apply some of those observations to this project.
So far, programmers have come out of the woodwork to tackle the problem of re-creating the network and interface, and everyone has been sounding off about how to support the venture (I've heard everything from university grants to corporate partners).
Jason posted a comment from one of his readers that I think has relevance to ORBlogs' future as well:

We have a responsibility to do more than just build it and hope they will come… how could a site like this serve the other, and equally important, constituency - local advertisers? We will need to be just as innovative in creating, er, fostering, the buyer/seller community as we are in creating new forms of journalism.

Now, not every blogger who signs up with ORBlogs cares about what happens to journalism or, for that matter, local advertisers. But what made ORBlogs cool was that it was homegrown and allowed people to better know the writers who were working from their part of the state.
Early discussions about moving forward with ORBlogs expressed concern over becoming PDXBlogs (as in Portland only). That's a very real concern. ORBlogs will fail if that happens (or at least will get competition for a Not-PDXBlogs site).
Ideas about partnering with the Oregonian newspaper are also misguided. The O has plenty of active blogs and should absolutely be part of the network, but tying in with a newspaper is bad mojo, in my opinion: too much heirarchy, too little grassroots control, too much potential for growth.
The issue is that we're working under an open source model right now, with individuals emerging to take over certain parts under their expertise. It's pretty exciting actually.
Anyone have any ideas for how we might proceed? What do the best blog networks offer readers and members?

[Brad Flora]

What's the problem exactly? Money? Technology?

[Matt Neznanski]

No problem really, we're just trying to move to the next step of blog aggregators.
Since we're all working on our freetime (coders and bloggers) to get things up and running, and we've had Web hosting donated, we're not in need of cash just yet.
And maybe it's best to stay on the cheap and community-based model anyway. Just wanted to see if anyone else had blog network experience.

[Brad Flora]

Well would this be a hosted blognetwork or a self-hosted one. It sounds like the latter.

Something I'd recommend checking out is Drupal's new memetracker add-on. Basically you could set up a Techmeme.com-like site that displays and clumps blog posts from your network based on keyword and timeliness.

I've got an install of it running on a server somewhere. If you had a list of RSS feeds, I could plug them, fire a new tracker up and send you the link. It might work well for what your blogs cover...it might not.