Add Your Local Blog to WikiCity
by Matt on Jul 22, 2009 in Promotion
WikiCity is inviting local bloggers to add your blog(s) to their city pages. The process is simple — you provide the URL of your blog, your blog’s RSS feed, and choose a category (News, Lifestyle, Sports, etc.) and hit the submit button. There’s a section for local blogs on each WikiCity page, right below the map and above the local Twitter feed section. Here’s what it looks like on the Wahoo, Nebraska page:
Here’s WikiCity’s news release about the new local blogrolls. Co-founder Pat Lazure tells me that submissions are added into the system immediately, but are later reviewed for relevance and appropriateness.
Why bother adding your blog? Two obvious reasons:
1. Exposure WikiCity may be fairly new, but if people take a liking to building out city pages they way they build out pages on Wikipedia, it could grow into a valuable local resource. And it could be a site that gets a lot of traffic from search engines, just like Wikipedia does. It’s not unreasonable to think you’ll gain some exposure from people clicking through to read your blog posts.
2. SEO Beyond the eyeball exposure, there’s the SEO benefit of having an extra link (or a couple) to your blog. I’ve mentioned before that linkbuilding can be tough for local blogs, so why would you pass up the chance to promote your blog this way?
Not familiar with WikiCity? It’s a local version of Wikipedia, with city guides instead of articles. That’s how I’d describe it. Here’s how WikiCity describes itself:
Much like Wikipedia, WikiCity is a free wiki, and anyone can contribute. However, WikiCity further differentiates itself because it is designed to promote local community, commerce, tourism, and everyday life within the towns it serves – thus welcoming content that is typically not suited for Wikipedia. Founded in late 2008 by Pat Lazure and Rohit Keshwani, WikiCity provides unique local content on places, events, and people who would be of interest to those associated with any of its 22,000 U.S. towns (for example: Wahoo, NE, Machias, ME, or Red Wing, MN). It serves these communities much like a local newspaper and business directory, yet using the same open source MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, any of its readers are allowed to contribute content.
Local blogrolls aside, it looks like an interesting concept that’s worth watching.
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