A couple months ago I met Dave Mastio, a former USA Today editorial board member who had built a website tracking state and local blogs. I’ve long had an interest in this area since one of my responsibilities at the Heritage Foundation is reaching out to bloggers of all stripes, not just those with hundreds of thousands of eyeballs on their blogs.

Mastio’s website, BlogNetNews.com, was designed to aggregate headlines from blogs based on their geographic location. As a resident of Virginia, for instance, I have used it to follow political news and chatter among Virginia bloggers.

But what interested me even more about Mastio was his desire to create something on par with LeftyBlogs.com, the popular site that aggregates content by state from liberal bloggers. Mastio’s new creation, ingeniously named RightyBlogs.com, debuted yesterday. I asked him a few questions about the site and what he hopes to do with it. His answers are below.

How did you come up with this idea?

In building the non-partisan aggregator BlogNetNews.com, I have created databases of blogs covering state and local politics in 40 states so far. In almost every state (with the exception of Tennessee, Wisconsin and Kansas), left-leaning blogs outnumber their right-leaning counterparts by a significant margin, often 2-to-1 or more. So I started asking bloggers on the right and the left why that was. There were plenty of stupid answers such as conservatives don’t care about state and local issues and conservatives aren’t smart enough to come up with their own ideas without a pied piper like Rush Limbaugh to lead them.

Why are right-leaning blogs so outnumbered?

I can’t remember who told me that the blogosphere is an “attention economy” where traffic (attention) is the currency that rewards hard work. The left has institutionalized that with LeftyBlogs.com — an aggregation tool that locally focused bloggers can use to promote each other and spread the attention to the best new posts. (It was put together by prescient Democratic political consultant Kari Chisholm at Mandate Media). One reason Tennessee has such a vibrant conservative blogosphere is that Instapundit and a handful of others have made a real effort to promote new and smaller bloggers when they’ve done something interesting.

What are your goals for RightyBlogs?

I decided to create RightyBlogs.com to take the ideas behind LeftyBlogs and do them better. I hope conservative bloggers at the national level and the local level will use RightyBlogs in three ways.

1) National bloggers with well-established traffic can use it to find the best local blog posts when issues at the state or local level start getting national attention. It makes sharing the traffic easier and faster.

2) RightyBlogs creates a headline feed of the latest blog posts across each state that local and state bloggers can ad to their site to help promote each other. You can use the RSS however you want or pick up the Java code found on each state site. (Click here for the Iowa code.)

3) RightyBlogs also creates a targeted search engine (that can also be hosted on most blog sites) that lets bloggers quickly find what other locals are saying on topics of interest so that it is easier to find links without wading through the spam and irrelevant stuff you’ll find on Technorati or Google Blog Search.

Does this mean that BlogNetNews leans conservative, too?

No, BlogNetNews strives to accurately reflect what is going on in distinct slices of the blogosphere, whether it is Virginia news and politics or parenting or college sports. Most of BlogNetNews’ state news and politics sites lean left because that reflects the reality of the local blogosphere.

My personal politics are pretty conservative. I spent a year as a speechwriter for the Bush Administration, but I was too ideologically unreliable to do it for long. I may well have been the only Bush Administration political appointee who has freelanced for Mother Jones and Salon. Anyway, the point of all BlogNetNews sites, whether they are the non-partisan BlogNetNews sites, the conservative RightyBlogs site or the sites we are just starting to launch with mainstream media partners, is to provide information people are looking for and get the heck out of the way.