Seattle Blog-gregator Relaunches

KING Seattle’s pioneering blog aggregator Citizen Rain has relaunched. Featuring the best of some 325 Seattle-focused blogs, CitizenRain.com now lets users aggregate by community. 

Citizen Rain comes from KING’s Cory Bergman, who of course manages the Lost Remote blog. We’d written about Citizen Rain in the fall, when content was aggregated by topic, such as Music, Sports and Technology. You can still group posts by topic, but can now hyper-localize content to your specific community, along with event calendars and free classifieds. Citizen Rain offers 10 communities (oddly, five start with B: Bainbridge, Ballard, Bellevue, Bellingham and Belltown), with more to come.  

What’s also interesting is the Belo station’s take on aggregation. All news sources qualify to get played up on Citizen Rain, even if they’re from the competition; a homepage story of a stabbing under "Latest News" comes from Cox’s KIRO Seattle, and a weather one (heavy rain in Seattle–there’s a news flash) comes from Fisher station KOMO. Also, you don’t see any KING branding on the site, just a tiny ‘KING5-TV’ on the bottom of the page.

Cool stuff.