What would be a good name for a site that tracks familial relationships between blogs? I thought of a couple names but none fitted quite right (BlogGenealogy is just too unwieldy) so I decided to settle on BlogTree.com - since that’s how genealogy charts are represented.

I took advantage of the 4th of July break to register the domain and start working on the database schema. I want to have a list of authors (their info remains private) each of which can have several blogs. Each blog has pertinent information (name, canonical url, alternate urls, date of creation, date of “death”, etc.) as well as a list of “parent” blogs, i.e. journals that inspired it into existence.

The main navigation through the blogs will be on a page that displays the blog’s info along with a list of its “parents” (blogs that inspired this blog) and “children” (blogs that were inspired by it). Clicking on these related blogs will make them the focus and display their parents and children, respectively.

I’ll actually collect other info for statistical analysis, such as gender, age language of author, etc. I’ll probably run queries on a regular basis that display average age, branching, etc.