Makeovers for BlogNetNews.com and PoliticsPA.com

Two of my favorite aggregators have redesigned their home pages.

What's an aggregator you say? Beats me. I just like the sound of the word.

An aggregator is a Web site the collects information and links to other blogs and Web sites and helps you navigate through the vastness of the World Wide Web.

I think there's something like 60 million blogs on the Internet and the number grows every day. Finding the type of blogs or other Web sites you're interested in is like finding that proverbial needle in a haystack.

This has led to the creation of aggregator sites which attempt to steer readers to the types of sites they are interested in reading.

Since we're talking politics, BlogNetNews is one of the best national sites. The firm also has separate sites for 35 of the 50 states, so if you're interested in reading what the leading bloggers in Pennsylvania are writing, you go http://www.blognetnews.com/Pennsylvania

PoliticsPa.com concentrates exclusively on Pennsylvania politics. It bills itself as "Pennsylvania's Political Community" and has been operating since 2001. The biggest complaint for regular users of PoliticsPA was the cluttered look of its home page, which consisted of endless lists. The new design is much cleaner and easier to navigate.

BlogNetNews bills itself as "The blogosphere's frong page" and claims to be "a generation ahead" of other aggregators.

"We're not interested in reprinting your posts and we don't have an ideological ax to grind," according to its site "We are going to use your feeds and the feeds of top bloggers from your online community to create new content and information that will organize this slice of the Internet making it work better for bloggers and their readers."

BlogNetNews also offers these features:

1. The day's top news based solely on what news stories Pennsylvania bloggers are linking to -- no matter what mainstream news source they're in.
2. A micro search engine that will only search the Pennsylvania blogosphere.
3. A quick guide to the hottest blog comment sections in Pennsylvania.
4. A quick index of the day's most active Pennsylvania blogs.
5. A guide to the blog posts most link to by other Pennsylvania bloggers.

It's worth bookmarking both sites and checking them daily if you're interested in staying on top of the political scene in Pennsylvania.