How we look for blogs

One of the difficulties with finding blogs in Northeastern Pennsylvania is...well, actually finding them. I've had some luck with the Blogger "Location" feature, which will let me see the profiles of bloggers with Blogspot blogs who have identified their location as, say, Scranton or Wilkes-Barre or Towanda or Tunkhannock. I can then look at these profiles and see if these people actually have blogs, and if their blogs are active, and if their blogs are worth linking to. Or I can do a "brute force" search, Googling terms like "NEPA blogger" (that one gets a lot of hits from Nepal and Nigeria, where the electricity is provided by an outfit called NEPA) or "Wilkes-Barre blog" or terms like that.

I think I was doing a brute force search for "Scranton blogs" when I came across this site:

Top 50 Blogs in Scranton, PA - NetworkedBlogs.com

I've heard of Networked Blogs before, though I don't know anything about them. All of these blogs must be linked to Networked Blogs in some way. Each one lists how many followers it has, and then how many followers from Scranton it has. So while Mashable.com has nine followers in Scranton, that doesn't mean much considering that it has 89,290 followers total. But I did notice that for some of these blogs, a larger percentage of followers are from Scranton: For example, VeganSweetiePie also has nine followers from Scranton, but this is out of a global total of thirteen. So it seems likely that VeganSweetiePie is a blogger from somewhere in or near Scranton, or has a strong Scranton connection.

So now we go to this site:

VeganSweetiePie

http://vegansweetiepie.blogspot.com/

Poking around a bit, I see she makes a reference to ECTV - Electric City TV out of Scranton. So far so good. I also see that she hasn't posted since  - ummm, 2.18.2010, which, assuming we're not in a European country where they have eighteen months, translates into February of last year. Is this a dead blog?

Moving to her profile, I see she's listed her Location as NEPA. That's good. But she doesn't list any other blogs, so I have no idea what she's been up to for the past seventeen months.

Let's see. Her video on Vimeo identifies her as Heather M. Davis (assuming that the person in the video and the person in the profile pic are the same person.) Clicking through on her name link takes you to this page, which doesn't tell you much more other than the fact that she "liked" something 30 days ago. The link from her Vimeo page to her MySpace page is to a page that hasn't been updated in over two years.

And that's where the trail gets cold. There are lots of Heather Davises on Facebook, and fewer Heather M. Davises. Googling her name plus "vegan" returns some promising results. But, all in all, it looks like this is a NEPA blogger who has stopped blogging.

So I'll file this away. Maybe someday I'll post it to NEPA Blogs, along with a few other interesting but apparently dead blogs that I have recently found. There are plenty of other blogs on the Networked Blogs Top 50 Blogs in Scranton, PA that need investigating. And then I have to start poking around on Networked Blogs to see if I can get results for places other than Scranton.