Building a Canadian Blog Directory?

In the past few months, I’ve been working with a lot of start-ups looking to spread the word about what they’re doing. Given the continuing decline of traditional media coverage, blogs are taking a more important role.

In Canada, however, it can be difficult to identify and target bloggers because there doesn’t seem to be a good, user-friendly directory to discover the most interesting, relevant or popular blogs. There have been some attempts to build a directory in the past but some of them have disappeared, or the directories don’t work well because they are hard to use, or the blog database leaves much to be desired.

So, how do you launch a valuable and useful Canadian blog directory that makes it easy to find the best, relevant, most interesting, most commented on or most active blogs? At the same time, how do new blogs that have great content capture the spotlight?

One of the challenges is that defining “best”, “most interesting” and “relevant” is difficult because they mean difficult things to different people. What’s “best” for one person may be completely unappealing to someone else.

As a result, a useful blog directory may involve different approaches. These could include:

1. Listing blogs based on things such as the number of RSS subscribers, how often content is posted, how many in-bound links they’ve attracted, or a ranking such as Quantcast or Compete.

2. A Wiki structure in which blogs could be added to the directory based on what people think of them. The Wiki could include rankings or thumbs/thumbs down voting to provide scoring. Of course, blogs could also be removed or edited by Wiki members.

3. A curated directory in which blogs would have to be nominated to be included. This would clearly involve subjectivity but it may be a solid approach in the short-term to establish a firm foothold.

At the same time, interesting new blogs would also be put into the spotlight to encourage people to visit the directory on a regular basis. It would also give bloggers some encouragement that their efforts are being recognized.

So, what approach do you think would work best? Is there a directory already out that there has potential?