CT Biz Blogs

Connecticut Windows on the Natural World is a beautiful weblog. In the header, it’s described like this:

There may be no place better than Connecticut to discover nature. This blog tells of local discoveries about geology, paleontology, ecology and fisheries over the past two centuries and connects them with events in the world today.

This site looks to be Brendan Hanrahan’s companion site to www.cttrips.com. Searching Google for “connecticut” and “geology” brings links to www.cttrips.com on the first page. While he doesn’t seem to need the blog to drive business to his main site, it does nicely augment it.

The main site is mostly about the nature books he sells, and some general info on nature in Connecticut. The weblog has posts about hikes he’s taken with his sons, reports of field trips, and other topics with local interest, complete with photos and diagrams. Reading this weblog shows me that he really knows his stuff, and gives me more confidence that the books he’s selling contain good information.

A blog like this is more interesting to me than the website, and should be driving traffic there. Since I didn’t find this weblog on Google, I don’t think this one does, yet. But it’s still a relatively young weblog, less than a year old.

From the photos, I can tell that Hanrahan has an account on Flickr, one of the liveliest places on the web. Yet, the pictures don’t link back there. Flickr is a vibrant community of people who put up photos and browse everyone else’s photos. Hanrahan could be linking from his weblog to his photos, and he could have comments in his Flickr photos which refer to the weblog. I wouldn’t put in a link (and I’m not sure you can) but perhaps something like “photo for my post on the Mohawk State Forest hike at the Connecticut Windows on the Natural World blog.” It can’t hurt.