The new Placeblogger site launched today, the product of Lisa Williams of H20Town. Built on Drupal by the folks at Bryght, the first cut looks very Web 2.0 (down to the shiny buttons).

The site aggregates blogs (natch) that are about specific places. So, for example, the Goose doesn’t count because it isn’t about a location. But Bluffton Today does, and I think SavannahNow does, too, though the site only indexes one blog from SavannahNow, Scott Larson’s The City Unfiltered.

Here’s Lisa’s explaination:

A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time.
It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution.
It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism.
It’s about the lived experience of a place.
…
Placeblogs spring from a fiercely non-generic America that’s not about big-box retailers or the type of polarizing discussion about politics, culture, and the economy that’s the product of journalism that happens at the 30,000 foot level.

That seems a bit heavy-handed to me, but it captures the spirit of the movement quite well. As usual, Jay Rosen (who’s on the advisory board) has more details.

Aggregation is an idea that we’ve toyed with, and Drupal makes it very easy to accomplish.

One complaint: I’d like to see aggregate pages for states and regions that include the X most recent posts. Currently, to read posts you have to go to a specific blog page.

The framework idea is sound, though, and this is the type of thing that more people will use if they continue to turn away from newspapers that aren’t local.