Support local yokels internationally

There is a fair amount of emphasis on how locals are doing it for themselves. A good example is the local online video sharing scene which Tyler has done a great job covering. Another issue which has come up is localised search which Mike has written fairly passionately about in his post titled "Why I Want Localised, Specialised Search". I support the idea that we should have a way of limiting our searches and tracking activities to local content and I discussed this with Mike a few months ago. It is a project I would love to see developed and the big question is how to identify all those South African sites spread across the many domains that we tend to use. If there is a way to tag all those sites then we are in a great position to start grouping South African sites together and running localised searches on those sites.

I’d like to see something else happen as well and it came to me when I was writing about the Stormhoek / 2007 SA Blog Awards saga over on Wired Gecko this morning. Mike had a screenshot from a Technorati search on Stormhoek showing Stormhoek’s rating in the blogosphere as tracked by Technorati on his post:

Look at that ranking. Stormhoek’s blog is ranked at 9 187 out of around 65 million blogs tracked by Technorati. There are 816 links from 339 blogs. How many of you can boast as good or a better ranking on Technorati? Why is this important? Well, people searching for things on the Web on Technorati or even the usual search engines are more like to find your blog if you have loads of people linking to you and talking about you.

The thought I had was that we, as a community, ought to also be working towards boosting the profile of South African blogs on international search engines like Technorati and Google in addition to promoting each other from within. One simple way to do this is to link to each other and talk about what we are all doing in addition to our posts about what is going on north of the Limpopo. Obviously we can’t all link to everyone else but perhaps give that a little more thought next time you link to a source blog post. Let’s boost the profile of local blogs and content in international search results as well. Let’s show the international community what great stuff we can generate.

Tags: technorati, google, south africa, south african content, blogs, linking, talking about south african blogs, share, promote south african content