So many blogs, so little time--and now, so many entrepreneurs hoping to help you sort through them.
As the number of blogs, news services and other syndicated sources of online information balloons, a new crop of start-ups has emerged promising to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. And venture capitalists and veteran Internet investors Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway are right behind one of them.
Rojo Networks, a San Francisco start-up in the blog aggregation business, "is wrapping a communications capability around content consumption," said Andreessen, Web browser pioneer, Rojo investor and Opsware chairman. "And the killer app for the Internet is and always has been communication."
The boomlet in blog aggregation start-ups comes as online content increasingly is pushed to readers using protocols such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom, which transmit fresh lists of headlines and content summaries to a browser, a Web site like Rojo or a separately downloaded application.
According to a recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 5 percent of Internet users in the United States used syndication technologies in 2004 to read news headlines and other content. Blog readership was up 58 percent, and more than 8 million Americans created blogs of their own.
To help negotiate the expanding online universe of syndicated content, blog aggregators abound. Hundreds of desktop software titles like FeedDemon and NetNewsWire exist. Yahoo in October revamped its My Yahoo pages using RSS as an underlying technology. The Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser and an upcoming Netscape browser based on it have RSS capabilities as well.
Rojo--which is pronounced to rhyme with "mojo"--was founded in June 2003 in San Francisco and launched a test, invitation-only site this past spring. Now Rojo has a few thousand users and grants current consumers the ability to invite others, much the way Google grew its Gmail service last year.
In addition to angel investments by Andreessen and Conway, Rojo collected two rounds of venture funding led by TPG Ventures, a Menlo Park, Calif., VC firm affiliated with the Texas Pacific Group, a private equity investment group.
Rojo founders Chris Alden, CEO, and Kevin Burton, lead engineer, designed tools much like those that established Web sites offer to help visitors determine relevance in other contexts.
Like Google's PageRank algorithm and other search engine technologies, Rojo examines the link structure of the so-called blogosphere in order to call attention to blog items and feeds that have proved popular with other readers. Along the same lines, it follows e-commerce sites like Amazon.com in recommending related feeds.
And like social networking sites such as Friendster, Rojo narrows down the community of blog readers to those within a user-defined network of friends and associates.
"Given that there are now millions of content streams, millions of blogs, the task of reading content online has become a much more complex
Overlooked in this article; the next version of Mac OS X (that is 10.4 Tiger) will come with Safari RSS, a web browser with an RSS news reader built in: <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/" target="_newWindow">http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/</a> safari.html
Look out for Mac OS X Tiger some time in the first half of this year, it's going to be great.
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10.4 Tiger) will come with Safari RSS, a web browser with an RSS
news reader built in: <a class="jive-link-external" href="http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/" target="_newWindow">http://www.apple.com/macosx/tiger/</a>
safari.html
Look out for Mac OS X Tiger some time in the first half of this
year, it's going to be great.