I’m a bit late on this but LostRemote and Search Engine Watch report on the launch of blog directory Placeblogger.

The site is backed by the Center for Citizen Media, whose executive director is prolific blogger and Drilling Down on Local ‘06 keynoter Dan Gillmor. It is a location-specific blogging directory that geo tags blogs to be indexed and searched by their physical location or any particular locations to which their content pertains. It had about 700 blogs indexed at launch.

This should fit right in with some of the user-generated news and hyper-local content sites mentioned yesterday, which encourage local news and commentary. It could have more traction, however, because of its ability to scale by aggregating lots of personal blogs, rather than building a set of hyper-local sites from scratch.

Giving local relevance to blogs and other social media is also being developed by mapping providers such as Microsoft’s Windows Live Local in its integration of Spaces (blogging), Messenger (IM) and Collections feature. These functions will also carry over to Microsoft’s new Virtual Earth 3-D mapping engine that could represent the future of online mapping, and a centerpiece of local search.

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