After heated debates in different blogs and a very interesting discussion on the (awfully named) bloggerbosse mailinglist, the proposed new and open swiss blogs list and the ping hub found a final home: Alain generously made available his blogug.ch domain

  • list.blogug.ch

The new and hopefully final home of the open Swiss blogs list. Everyone can now contribute to that list, maintain his own blogs (after you claimed them), tag them and helping out as admin. The basic idea of this list is to provide an exhaustive list of swiss blogs, which anyone can use for their own purposes. The data is licensed under a Creative Commons License and everyone is invited to use it for their own projects like an aggregator or something else, the ideas are unlimited. As the blog owners can tag their blogs, it's also possible for aggregators to just get the blogs with a certain tag. This makes it possible to for example build an aggregator with only political blogs. There's already a help page of how you can get those blogs as an OPML document. More features are planned for the future. Very big thanks to Patrice for coding all that and to Matthias of blog.ch for providing the initial batch of 700+ Swiss blogs.

And to make it clear, that service will not be just another aggregator. It won't aggregate blog posts, its main purpose is to provide a list of Swiss blogs for others to build such things on top of it.

So, go ahead, claim (or add) your blog and tag it accordingly.

  • ping.blogug.ch

Beni and me were coding on another “community service”, a so called ping hub. Its main intend is to be something like ping-o-matic or weblogs.com just for Switzerland. Aggregators or other services can add their ping url to the ping hub (just mail us or make a comment below) and they then will be pinged as soon as someone pings the ping hub and therefore immediately notified if a blog was updated.

Blog owners are of course encouraged to add http://ping.blogug.ch/ to their pinging services list (otherwise the whole thing won't work :)).

In wordpress, add http://ping.blogug.ch/ in wp-admin > options > writing > update services.

In Freeflux/Flux CMS, go to Site-Options and add it to the “blogWeblogsPing” option (freeflux.net currently pings it by default).

For other software, it should work similar.

There's also an XML file available with the latest blogs, which pinged us.

Again, the basic idea here is to provide other services with a useful service and not to build something on its own (and to avoid, that every aggregator has to pledge its “users” to add him to the “ping services” list)

  • top100.blogug.ch

The top100 list also got a nicer URL, it will also use the list of list.blogug.ch in the future.

  • *.blogug.ch

Alain, the owner of the blogug.ch domain is happy to give out more subdomains for similar “community” projects. Just get in contact with him, if you have a nice idea.

And as you certainly noticed, design is somehow missing. If anyone wants to provide a nice design for all the *.blogug.ch projects, do not hesitate to get in contact with us.

And now, start adding your blogs, ping us and build new exciting tools on top of the existing ones.