D'log: a weblog is run by someone who lives fairly near me (as found on Birmingham Blog) and it's got a really nice design. Clean and sparse, but well-balanced. Powered by GreyMatter, too, which I thought was dying out.
On the other side of the coin, my other interesting discovery from the Birmingham Blog list is Jonathan's phrenzy.org, which is a lot more technical and less clean in design -- sort of a k10k cluttered feel to it, but that's sometimes pretty interesting. Lots of cool little widgets on there too: a form to send an SMS, the tagboard, ad nauseam.
Once again, we get into the same problem of disparate services; the Birmingham Blog list is a list of bloggers in my area (for those who have mailed the list maintainer), GeoURL tells you people near you (of those who have registered), the Blogchalking codes allow me to search for blogchalk "United Kingdom/West Midlands/Birmingham" (for those who have such codes). Too many little services that most people aren't signed up for. D'log pings blo.gs where phrenzy.org does not. I'm not sure I can see a way around this; blo.gs pinging (well weblogs.com pinging) is integrated into a fair few blogging systems these days, which is handy, but most people don't have blogchalking codes or GeoURL ICBM addresses or whatever. So how do you find bloggers near you so that you can go and have lunch with them?
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Jonathan
Andy Pryke
hullo :)thanks for linking my site in your blog. glad that you liked the design! as for GreyMatter dying out – its still very popular. I am currently writing my own PHP blogging software. should be good :)