Globally Local  

Up until now the only way to find blogs on Grokodile was to navigate down to the community level. If you were just browsing the directory you’d stand a good chance of hitting smaller communities without any blog listings.

As of today you can also access ranked lists of blogs based on subject tags. Popular tags are listed on our home page.

Each blog owner can choose subject tags that they feel are suitable for their particular blog. Also, these can be updated any time by using the detail link associated with their listing.

So what’s coming soon? More ways to search and navigate the directory using tags…

In order to help less experienced blog owners use our open revenue sharing concept a simple HTML generator has been added.

The form only generates links to a small set of cities — generally cities that already have a decent amount of content. I may experiment with an Adwords campaign to see what kind of adoption rate there is after the recent upgrades.

While this hasn’t taken off yet I do think there is value in allowing bloggers to earn revenue without having to clutter up their blogs with ads, pop-up links, paid posts or other items of dubious quality.

Grokodile isn’t just a blog directory anymore. Now it’s a local community mashup.

With local videos, local twitter users, local bloggers, local businesses and other features you can connect and communicate with other local people easier than ever.

Don’t worry, we still rank blogs within their community and by custom tags to make it easier to find popular content.

Grokodile is now using cloud computing!

Okay, I’m not sure this will be of interest to most blog authors, but it will let us do some interesting things in the near future. It also means — as of today — that our web site is much faster.

Anyway, keep your eyes peeled…

I’ve decided to participate in the Netflix prize.

The idea is to use past movie rating behavior to accurately predict ratings that those users would give to other movies.  Obviously, the idea is to find a way to do this well so that people can be given what they like.  This would promote movies rentals and other beneficial behavior such as telling other people how good a job Netflix does and providing good movie choices.

I’m very late in this game and there are teams of PhD level folks that have spent endless amounts of time tuning complex formulas to get close to winning the contest.   Think in terms of several years of endless pursuit.

This makes it unlikely that I’ll even be able to crack the top 100 scores (lowest error score as measured by rmse value).  However, it’s a challenging puzzle, and just working on a recognized challenge with other motivated people is rewarding.

Wish me luck!

Grokodile’s integration with Twitter has been increased a bit more.  Now, over time, every city page in North America will display recent tweets from people local to that city.  For example, see the right sidebar for Buckner Missouri.

This does assume that there are some self-identified local people who tweet.

You may wonder how this is useful.  After all, you can already communicate with people on Twitter or via TweetDeck.  What can Grokodile give you that’s different?

Well, if you are starting to blog in a new community this will help you find other local bloggers who can show you the ropes.  Alternately, if you are traveling to a city that you don’t already have friends in, it will be very easy to find people who blog or tweet.  You’ll be able to get in touch with local experts to find out about places to stay, places to eat and things to see and do.

Finally, I realize that many people already know how to do a geo search on Twitter, but I’ll bet the majority of web users don’t.  It’s okay to simplify a process or make it more available to others. Even if sometimes the cognoscenti would rather guard their secrets…

Real people.  Real communication.  Isn’t that what the net is about?

I’ve recently become a twitter user.  Yes, really.

In any case, now, when you add your blog to Grokodile, you may optionally enter your twitter ID too.  When you do so Grokodile will link to your Twitter profile page from your blog listing.

This makes it very easy to find other local bloggers or to find people in a community you are going to visit.

Shoo.  Out.  Darn crickets.

I know, it’s been a bit slow in Grokodile blog land lately.

In any case a glitch in the stats system has been corrected.  The quantcast numbers should once again consistently reflect reality.

Oh yes, it might take several days for the updated algorithm to recrunch all the numbers…

Grokodile is considering a $4.99 annual review fee for non-blog entries.   In particular, we think businesses, real estate brokers, tourist attractions and other commercial entities using our directory should be willing to pay for the service that we provide.

What do you think?

Wait, before you answer, consider this:

• Every day we have to review and remove spurious entries that have been created by bottom of the barrel SEO companies.
• Sometimes sites that are deemed appropriate when added then change their nature shortly after acceptance.
• Often, and without notice, sites that were once appropriate will fade out of existence entirely.

It takes a lot of time and effort to review sites, ensure that they have been categorized appropriately, and perform spot checks on older sites from time to time in order to pre-emptively remove stale links.

So, what do you think?

First, a big thanks to everyone that added their blog to Grokodile during the month of August.

And now, without further ado, the randomly chosen winner of our August sweepstakes is White Noise. Check it out… you’ll find personal, humorous and insightful commentary on a variety of issues.