Lisa Williams’ PlaceBlogger launched today. It aggregates blogs that are about the places where the bloggers live. Unlike Steve Johnson’s Outside.in, it is hand-assembled and it focuses on bloggers writing about where they live; Outside.in maintains a list of placebloggers but it also aggregates posts about places no matter the location of the people who wrote them. That gives PlaceBlogger a certain intimacy and the potential to seed local communities of bloggers, while Outside.in is better site if you’re trying to find everything said about a location. It also means that, especially at the outset, Outside.in has more stuff, while PlaceBlogger feels a bit sparsely populated…so pitch in and add to PlaceBlogger the placeblogs you rely on.

I love the idea both these sites pursue, knitting the virtual with the real, words with dirt.

Quintura is copyrighted 2006 but Hanan Cohen just pointed it out to me this morning, so I’m counting it as new in my 2007. Type in a search term and it creates a cloud of related topics (using the Yahoo search engine), which you can use to refine your search by adding them or excluding them. Unfortunately, the site was timing out for me this morning, but you can see a screen video demo here. [Tags: placeblogs blogs placeblogger outside.in quintara everything_is_miscellaneous taxonomy lisa_williams steve_johnson]