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Finding regional blogs

Jan 08 2007
8

One of the things I find really frustrating about the existing blog searches is that it’s extremely difficult to find blogs by region.  I know, the internet has no borders and all that jazz, but in some cases, country of origin really matters.

Currently, I need to reach bands attending Canadian colleges and universities.  Granted, this is a far more specific request than the average user is going to have, but damn, am I stymied.  Technorati is pretty usless for this kind of search, and Google Blog Search even moreso.  So far, blogscanada.ca has been the best way, but the way it’s set up is not terribly conducive to efficient research.

Anyone have a clever way to find blogs by region?  Better yet, anyone have a great list of Canadian music sites?  Maybe a few of them can get together and create a meme along the lines of the “Z-list”!

  • http://www.creativetraction.com Duane Brown

    Ryan, If you wanted to find bands who are still in school. It would almost seem faster to just call up/email the local student union and ask them. Most would know of local bands on campus, as would the local school radio station. The radio station might even put a call out to bands, if you wanted them to help you with a press piece. I’ve a list of radio stations at college/universities, if you are interested in it.

    Otherwise I think using Facebook and doing an advanced search might help. Most would put they are in a band in their interest section along with the network being the school they attend. This would help you find bands I think.

    A Canadian site I like is http://www.projectopus.com

  • http://www.ryananderson.ca Ryan

    Hey Duane – we’re getting in touch with the college radio stations, advertising on Facebook by network and reaching out to some individual bands as well.

    The campus radio station list I have is decent, but I’d love to have something to compare it against. If you’d like, I can send you the updated version when I’m done.

    Blogs are really the only missing part of the research puzzle at this point. Thanks for the help!

  • http://www.responsiblepress.org Joe

    As someone who was once in a university-based band, I’d advise being somewhat wary of relying only on campus stations (I realize you’re not relying only on them, but you catch my drift).

    Some stations pride themselves on being community-based or grounded in some other niche. As such, it can be hard to penetrate them as an emerging band. Considering they’re supposed to be a hotbed of indie culture, a lot of campus stations are surprisingly elitist when it comes to their own counter-culture cred.

    I think the social media approach is pretty good, actually. Find one band’s MySpace and see which other bands they list among their friends.

    As for new ideas, have you tried looking at music community sites? I’m a few years removed from such things so who knows what’s around know but there sure used to be some music-specific social media type networks.

    Lastly – and this is one of those time-consuming tasks best left to the high school intern – check out listings pages and arts sections from campus newspapers.

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  • http://www.prworks.ca David Jones

    Check out talk digger. They make some attempt at identifying the country of origin, but there are some other neat features too.

  • http://www.ryananderson.ca Ryan

    That’s an interesting one… I’ve never seen that one. Thanks for the tip, David!

  • Steph

    I know that umusic.ca (Universal Music Canada) has a blog attached to their website. Maybe other major Canadian labels have blogs on their sites as well. My other guess would be to see if indie labels have a blogs attached to their sites. A couple well known Canadian indie labels are Paper Bag, Dine Alone, Underground Operations. You will definitely get a regional feel from those. Also you might find some undiscovered bands plugging their shows on those blogs. As for actual college band blogs, I don’t know how many of them really do the blog thing. I know that most of my friends searching for new bands use Myspace. Those are my ideas; hopefully it’s of some help.

  • http://www.ryananderson.ca Ryan

    All great suggestions – thanks, Steph. We’ve got a list of bands with MySpace pages, and we’re just putting together a way of reaching out to them without seeming spammy.