After I mumbled something yesterday about the lack of a systematic way for bloggers to find each other, a word of thanks to Jeff Ward and Gaspar Torriero for pointing me towards the Pepys Project. I'd read about it before (possibly on Jeff's Visible Darkness) but had forgotten it.
I also note that, as with NYC bloggers, someone is attempting to create something for Boston bloggers.
What I was fumblingly trying to describe would differ from these voluntary efforts. The thought was not to have bloggers find, by chance, some sign-up list, but for blogs to be equipped with data "hooks" that would enable them to be found by a spider. In an email exchange with Jonathan Peterson, I suggested that what's needed is something (perhaps on the order of P2P) at work between Google and bloggers:
...for just simple stuff, like where people live, there needs to be something like a standard, searchable little set of "blogger features" - one voluntarily would enter whatever data one wishes, and that data would be the "hooks" for all kinds of networking.
That discussion arose after I read Jonathan's entry entitled "Death to Blogs."
Right now, Pepys Project lists 581 bloggers in the U.S., and precisely 2 in Mexico - i.e., it is essentially a list of those bloggers who are aware of the Pepys Project. This is not a criticism, just a difference from what I'm trying to describe. If blogs all had some simple marker that identified them as blogs, one could readily get past this sort of thing. Since not all bloggers wish to be visible in all their aspects (see Jenn's comment), one should have the option of what data to enter (location, passions, profession/school, age, etc.)
I'm not advocating a return to spatialized landscapes with avatars here, though I suspect that's coming too. I'm just thinking bloggers might find it useful to be able to access each other as easily as they can find Clark Terry's Incoherent Blues through a P2P function like Morpheus. A set of identifying hooks could be simple to build, and grow in sophistication as algorithms worked on them.
