We conceived and built BlogNetNews.com to help magnify and expand what's best about the blogosphere by growing the audience for local blogs. Our goal is to make the blogosphere more useful by making it easier for readers to find just the information they want quickly and easily while helping bloggers get better at what they do by providing them the information to more efficiently engage with their fellow bloggers and readers.

Here's what we do:

Search: Technorati and Google blog search the two bigfoots of the industry fail to cover many blogs. This is particularly true of state public affairs blogospheres. The two large search engines also make it difficult to limit searches to bloggers who are actually there (in terms of geography) or who have built up expertise in a particular field. BNN's segmented search tries to solve this problem by going wider and deeper within niches and clearly defining geographic and expertise boundaries. Here's an example of the improvement in blog search.

Feeds: By combining a community of blogs, whether it is a state's public affairs blogs or parenting blogs, the people most interested in the topic can subscribe to a single feed, a big convenience for readers.

So what do bloggers get out of the deal? When individual blogs change their feeds as is common when bloggers upgrade or change hosts or software, they can lose a significant amount of the readership that doesn't update their feed readers. If a blogs' readers have subscribed through BNN, they don't have to do anything. BNN makes one change to update a blog's feed and reader's seamlessly see the bloggers' posts.

BNN's feed system also make creating a feed that sends you just the posts you want even easier: Every single page on BNN creates its own feed. So if you just want to subscribe to liberal or just conservatives, simply use the sort feature at the top of each section's page and then subscribe to the feed at the bottom of the page. Need something even more customized? Try FeedCentral.

Statistics: Every section of BNN tracks which blogs are reporting the most new comments, which blogs have the most new posts, which blogs are getting clicked on the most by BNN readers, which blogs have the most influence on the blogospheric conversation and what national and local news stories have the blogs chattering. All those stats are previewed in the sites left sidebar and you can click on more for the full details.

Promotion: If the audience for blogging is going to grow, understanding networked slices of the blogosphere is going to have to get easier -- as easy as picking up a newspaper makes understanding the daily events of a town. BNN is an attempt to fill that role by giving newcomers and surfers a guide to what's going on, how things are connected and what's important.