Frank Barnako’s criticism, I hate to say it, is a bit mean-spirited and shows that he really doesn’t get the landscape of placeblogs.  If he’s going to criticize the addition of alt newspapers, then he may also want to criticize sites like TVNewser, which really isn’t all that bloggy (all due respect for what Laurel does at Mediabistro--but TVN’s more like an ongoing gossip column--no interaction with other bloggers or with readers.)

Further, there’s still the problem of blog abandonment (which also contributes to making Technorati’s blogospheric figures a bit hinky) People love to start sites, have lots of ambition, but when there’s no money and many real life demands, even the best-launched efforts can end up abandoned.  Placeblog-type efforts launched by newspapers can end up on hiatus or completely cut when either the money runs out or the reporter/editor keeping the blog gets downsized--which happened to some friends of mine. 

As for upkeep and reviews, at this point in time, Williams is probably doing most of the work on her own.  As we all know,money out here is limited, and while there’s money for development of the site, there many not be sufficient funding to hire staff that could track sites and write reviews.  If Barnako has some spare change, he might want to ante up so Williams could hire staff and implement all the wonderful stuff he’s carping about.

I’ve got to hand it to the Placeblogger folk for getting media coverage of what they’re doing.

We’ve been doing almost the same thing since July and, without being meanspirited, I think a lot better.

BlogNetNews.com is moving one state at a time so we can invest the energy to get much better coverage of what is going on in the local blogosphere. In every state BNN covers that I’ve compared with Placeblogger, we have more actual local blogs.

And we don’t just point to the blogs—we build a search engine for each state’s blogosphere, set a up a headline service for all the blogs, make it simple for bloggers to submit their posts to social media sites and give constantly updated stats on what news stories bloggers are linking to, where the most new comments are and whose blogs have the most new comments.

I hope you’ll come check us out.