Extremely metal poor ( XMP ) galaxies are known to be very rare , despite the large numbers of low-mass galaxies predicted by the local galaxy luminosity function . This paper presents a sub-sample of galaxies that were selected via a morphology-based search on SDSS images with the aim of finding these elusive XMP galaxies . By using the recently discovered extremely metal-poor galaxy , Leo P , as a guide , we obtained a collection of faint , blue systems , each with isolated H ii regions embedded in a diffuse continuum , that have remained optically undetected until now . Here we show the first results from optical spectroscopic follow-up observations of 12 of \sim 100 of these blue , diffuse dwarf ( BDD ) galaxies yielded by our search algorithm . Oxygen abundances were obtained via the direct method for eight galaxies , and found to be in the range 7.45 < 12 + \log { ( O / H ) } < 8.0 , with two galaxies being classified as XMPs . All BDDs were found to currently have a young star-forming population ( < 10 Myr ) and relatively high ionisation parameters of their H ii regions . Despite their low luminosities ( -11 \lesssim M _ { B } \lesssim - 18 ) and low surface brightnesses ( \sim 23 –25 mag arcsec ^ { -2 } ) , the galaxies were found to be actively star-forming , with current star-formation rates between 0.0003 and 0.078 M _ { \odot } yr ^ { -1 } . From our current subsample , BDD galaxies appear to be a population of non-quiescent dwarf irregular ( dIrr ) galaxies , or the diffuse counterparts to blue compact galaxies ( BCDs ) and as such may bridge the gap between these two populations . Our search algorithm demonstrates that morphology-based searches are successful in uncovering more diffuse metal-poor star-forming galaxies , which traditional emission-line based searches overlook .