If all politics is local, then locally-focused blogs are obviously important to anyone engaged in politics. But since the internet doesn't come with zipcodes attached to urls, it's not obvious how to discover these nodes of conversation and community? How to find blogs that are local hubs? Here are seven easy (and free) steps you can take:

1. Look up your location (town, city, state) in Placeblogger.com, a spanking new directory of 650 "hyper-local" bloggers built by former journalist and blogger Lisa Williams (of H2Otown), with advisory help from Jay Rosen and Dan Gillmor. (Full disclosure: I'm fans of all three.) Since the site is new, the coverage is still choppy (Williams only has two blogs for Baltimore, for example, and one hasn't updated in more than a month), but I expect it will grow as local bloggers use its registration tool to chime in. Placeblogger has ambitions of selling ads across its whole network of sites, which may become a magnet for local blogs to come on-board. (UPDATE: I got this wrong; having mis-heard something I thought Lisa said about Placeblogger last summer up at Harvard. She informs me that there is no such plan; I will have a more detailed post about her ideas for the site up shortly.)

2. Do the same location look-up over at Outside.in, a new site built by John Geraci and Steven Johnson that is aggregating information by neighborhood. I put in Baltimore on their search tool and found 176 posts tagged "politics." That may seem impressive, but in fact it looks like most of those are coming with one blog, Thesunlies, that appears obsessed with critiquing the Baltimore Sun newspaper. Still, what I like about Outside.in is that it makes it very easy and fun for anyone to zero in on what is happening in their neighborhood, and bloggers are catching on to the fact that it's very easy to add some of their content to the site and thus become more find-able by their neighbors. I posted something on Outside.in two months ago from my zipcode, and while no one else from my little town has added anything, the site now directs me to several dozen posts from blogs from towns nearby that didn't exist last I checked in.

3. If you're focused on a congressional district, go to Congresspedia (a wiki that has a page on every Member of Congress), search for your Member, and scroll down near the bottom of the page for "local blogs and discussion sites." You're likely to find buried treasure. (More disclosure: I'm a consultant to the Sunlight Foundation, which funds Congresspedia--and I've asked Conor Kenny, Congresspedia's editor, to create a single page with all the district-focused blogs they've got on the site. Of course, it's a wiki, which means anyone could come along and do that if they wanted!)

4. Use Technorati's directory of bloggers to hunt for sites that have self-categorized as being about a particular locality. For example, I found 59 blogs about Baltimore there, and since most of these bloggers have also chosen to tag themselves by other topics like politics, it's fairly easy to discover some local political blogs here. (Argh, more disclosure, my little brother started Technorati.)

5. If you're a blue-state type, check out LeftyBlogs, which has more than 2650 blogs listed by state. One very nice feature--the site aggregates posts from DailyKos diarists that are tagged with the name of a state. Online politics guru Kari Chisholm of Mandate Media is the genius behind LeftyBlogs.

6. And if you're a red-stater, check out Townhall.com's "Blogatorium" directory, which says it has more than 2800 blogs broken down by state, as well as by more than a dozen issue categories.

7. Ultimately, you're best approach is to pay attention to what local bloggers themselves are saying about their own region if you want to really get into a local blogosphere. For example, the Idaho-based Red State Rebels blog has a small but valuable directory on its own blogroll listing what it calls "Neighbors (bloggers from the Boise area, including a few from the Republican side of the aisle); Idahoans (bloggers from other parts of the state); Northwesterners (bloggers from Oregon and Washington state); [and] Westerners (a handful of blogs from the rest of the West)." Nobody knows their own turf as well as a local political blogger.

Got other suggestions for ways to go local? Did I miss your site? Chime in below.

Technorati Tags: Blogatorium, Blogging, congresspedia, Dan Gillmor, Jay Rosen, John Geraci, Kari Chisholm, Leftyblogs, Lisa Williams, Local blogs, Outside.in, Steven Johnson, sunlight foundation, Technorati

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