I’ve liked what Topix.net has been doing for awhile, especially how it has treated posts at this blog. It does a good job of filing under the correct context keywords and prominently features the posts. One of the best ways to a site owner’s heart is to push traffic to them which Topix tries hard to do. Also they are blending mainstream media with blogs (and clearly denoting blog sources by a purple ‘b’). Check out last night’s post about E Mail in the screenshot above and note they cropped out a thumbnail of the picture I took and inserted it into the story. It really sticks out on the page.

Another new feature is the ability to search over one year into the past by topic, city or zip code. You can access city pages with the following format:

topix.net/city/CITY-STATE_ABBREV

So to access the Topix page for Seattle, WA:

topix.net/city/seattle-wa

which redirects to: topix.net/city/seattle

RSS feeds by city or topic
RSS feeds are available for any city or topic. In most cases it appears by just adding .xml onto the end. Example using Seattle:

topix.net/rss/city/seattle-wa.xml

One thing I don’t like is when you hover over the links and it doesn’t show the URL in the status bar. I like to see where links are going before clicking them and disabling the mouseover is a bummer. Yes, I do realize that it can fake to show anything in the status bar onhover with JavaScript, but it’s still something I prefer to see so I don’t have to view source.

Zip code test
I’m testing the zip code feature by mentioning our business zip code: 98375. Let’s see if/when it appears on this page:

topix.net/city/south-hill-wa

Note that when doing a search for zip code it converts the result page to “South Hill” which isn’t completely accurate. The 98375 zip code goes well beyond South Hill. One thing about South Hill if you are ever passing through make sure it’s not between 4-6pm during the weekdays. The traffic is bumper to bumper miserable. The same can be said of most of rush hour traffic in this area.

• Topix.net blends 15k blogs with mainstream news sources
• Transparent Adsense posts
• French Maids TV
• Not bitten by the tag bug yet, introducing Feedmarker and Feedtagger
• Feedburner CEO: Click outs in RSS going down
• [site news] added spellchecker (for comments) and stats page