One of the most interesting ideas I heard at the recent Blognashville event was Glenn Reynolds' suggestion of "local blogs." (The image is from Notbored.)

I looked into it. Won't work.

Local blogs don't scale, except in a small number of instances, in localities that are in fact quite large. You can, in theory, have New York blogs, covering the whole city, but how local are we talking about?

There's not enough of an audience for a single local blogger to cover, say, school board meetings, or crime, or even business, and bring in any money at all.

The answer to scale is comprehension. But that brings its own problems.

By comprehension I mean covering everything on one site. Bring in data sources like real estate transactions, lawsuits, deaths, calendars, etc. And build a business model based, not on advertising, but on enabling local merchants to step into e-commerce in comfortable ways, say by converting Web orders for pizza into phone calls or cell phone alerts with data.

There is, in fact, a lot of money to be made in enabling car dealers to locate good prospects, in helping real estate agents find real buyers, and in helping local stores take baby steps like newsletters that can build loyalty.

The problem lies on the cost side of the house. Most local newspapers don't have RSS feeds. They don't want their content "syndicated" on the Web. They want people to buy the paper or go through their home page. In larger towns registration requirements are added, firewalls aimed at keeping content in.

That's not all. While blogger density is fairly high in cities, you're going to find it much lower in towns. This is partly a function of numbers. Cities have lots of people, thus lots of bloggers. Towns have fewer people, thus fewer bloggers.

So any data you get must replicate the entire process, at the entire cost, of an existing newspaper, without first having a viable business model. And you're still only serving a portion of the audience, that small portion that has regular Web access.

In other words local news blogging is still some distance away.