Six Apart, which makes the Movable Type blogging platform and hosts blog services TypePad and Vox, on Monday is launching Blogs.com, a new site designed to help readers find the best blogs on the Web.
Normally we wouldn't cover the launch of a blog here at Webware. Technically, Blogs.com is simply a content site built on the new Movable Type Pro platform. But this blog lives in an interesting space, and has an important background.
Before coming to Six Apart, CEO Chris Alden (disclosure: once my boss at Red Herring) created a company, Rojo, around an RSS reader. Rojo is no more. Rojo.com has become Six Apart's curated guide to the Web. Blogs.com will replace Rojo.com.
It's clear that driving people to blog content is a good thing for a blog platform company to do. But one might also assume that Six Apart, which is in competition with Automattic's WordPress, might tilt its recommendations to blogs running on its platform and not the other guy's. Alden say that will not be case. He told me that Blogs.com editor Wendy Taylor (another former co-worker of mine), who will run a staff of about five people, will have editorial independence.
Blogs.com will also be running top 10 lists of favorite blogs from "celebrities" like Wired editor in chief Chris Anderson and Ning's Marc Andreessen. I put "celebrities" in quotes here because they also asked me to do one. So the bar can't be that high.
One thing you won't see in Blogs.com, at least at launch, is the capability for users to vote items up or down on the system, Digg-like. And although Movable Type Pro has impressive social-networking features, they won't be turned on at launch.
Knowing the people involved and after reading Blogs.com's precusror, Rojo.com, I expect that Blogs.com will be a very good read. But I don't quite get how this is a strategic win for Six Apart. Considering the company's push into social content, launching yet another editorially driven (in other words, expensive) directory of blogs and sites seems to be a bit retrograde.
Blogged.com, a site that started off as a ratings-powered blog directory has branched out into new territory this morning. It's now compiling the hottest news headlines by hand. Competing news tracking services like TechMeme, Google News, and BlogRunner use automated systems or a slight mix of automation and editorial choice to categorize news as it happens. Blogged's will be entirely human-driven.
The move is a bit of a gamble to get people in the door. Once a user is looking at a story, they can dig into Blogged's directory and check out its rating, hopefully coming back later to add their own. There's also a new search tool that will let you search both blog listings and individual posts based on topic.
I got to ask founders Kenneth Yeh and Gladys Kong about the people behind these story selections. Apparently the team of feeders is the same group who's behind the blog ratings. Believe it or not, that means they're getting paid to sit around and read blog content in over a dozen different categories. "Our editors have pretty good taste," Yeh said. Not to mention a job (Yeh says they're hiring).
That same taste is what determines which stories get front page placement, even if someone else breaks the news first. The company is hoping quality will rule over velocity, although Yeh expects them to have approximate speed to the competitors.
Still on the horizon are additional ratings for writers, and a way to comb news using those ratings. "We are still working on that piece, as much as ratings," said Yeh.
Blogged's new story page will track hot stories in different disciplines.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Blogged.com, a new blog rating service, officially launches Monday. The service has a decent catalog of blogs in its archive and could be a useful tool if you're looking for blogs on a particular topic, or looking for yet more blogs to read.
There are two types of blog search sites. If you are looking for individual stories or items inside blogs, search tools such as Google Blog Search will do a good job of finding articles. In the other category are the blog directories, such as Blogged.com and BlogCatalog. They're more useful for finding blogs you want to follow regularly. Then there's Technorati, which does both, but isn't nearly as approachable as a directory as Blogged.com.
Blogged.com's value is that it editorially rates blogs in its catalog on a 1-to-10 scale, based on frequency of updates and quality of writing. The rating system is a bit of a black box, since the only review a site gets is the numerical score--you can't see the score breakdown or the supporting opinions of the reviewers. However, the goal is to get users rating the blogs, and if there are enough user reviews, the co-founders told me, that rating will take the place of the Blogged.com team's score. Blog authors can get a widget to put on their blogs that lets readers to rank their sites as well.
Each entry also has a list of "related blogs," a potentially useful feature I'm reserving judgment on, since the results it gave me were pretty random.
Blogged.com is building a directory of the blogosphere.
Eventually, according to Blogged.com, the service will rate writers in addition to blogs. Bring it on.
The site has its own social network. You can invite friends and share reviews. These features are overkill in a world already saturated by social networks. Fortunately, there's a Facebook application in the works, and the founders plan to integrate other existing networks into Blogged.com, so that users can share the blog favorites with the friends they've made elsewhere.
The site is a big search engine optimization and advertising play. The concept is that blog authors will submit their blogs to the service so that they will be able to benefit from links into Blogged.com's stellar catalog, which should drive them Web traffic. This model paradoxically assumes that blog discovery via search is currently broken, while at the same time relying on these broken search engines as the main door into the site's database. (See also: GenieTown). Although it sounds loopy, there is so much traffic and ad revenue on the major search engines that the model just might work.
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