Blogged, the blog directory that we introduced last February, has launched a news portal that aspires to hand-pick the most interesting stories from across the blogosphere. The company has employed a team of editors to identify trends and popular stories from around the web, which are presented in categories that include technology, entertainment, politics, and sports.
Unfortunately, Blogged will have to deal with one little problem - there are over one million blogs in its blogging directory, and (by their count) over 100 million live blogs across the web. With a staff of ten editors, there is obviously no way for them to keep tabs on every blog, even if they restrict themselves to the “top blogs” from each category. And the stories that are picked will be subject to personal bias.
This isn’t to say that Blogged won’t be able to keep their news page fresh - they’ll still be able to identify important stories just by watching a few top blogs. They’ll just have a hard time monitoring where the important discussions are occurring, or when the story broke in the first place. And without that, Blogged won’t have much credibility. But for readers who don’t particularly care where they get their news from, the Blogged homepage will work just fine.
There are already a number of well-established blog aggregators, most notably Techmeme, which is generally recognized as the definitive resource for hot stories and trends across tech blogs (the site has similar offerings for politics, sports, and gossip). Techmeme uses an algorithm to track upcoming stories, and is therefore able to effectively monitor many more blogs than a team of humans ever could.
The only advantage that this type of strategy will offer is the source/selector’s ability to read, understand, and analyze the “voice” of particular blogs. Any sort of algorithm that sources blogs does not have the ability (which is very human) to entirely understand context and the nuances of voice, within a specific blog. Voice can be the most attractive feature to a blog, no matter what the story is. Since there are multiple, even thousands, of blogs reporting on the same stories, the most becomes the differentiating factor. They should focus on the most written about stories, since these are easy to track, and then filter for the most creative and colorful voice.. some more awesome information here… look at excerpts.. http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
Hi Jason, this is Gladys Kong, co-founder of Blogged.com. First of all, thanks for your post about the relaunch of our site. There are a few things I would like to point out. While techmeme is a great service, it is purely focused on technology and it’s echoing what people are saying in the blogosphere. What Blogged.com is trying to offer is a little different, we’re bringing a human touch to expose people to new content and content sources. We want to showcase a wide range of talented bloggers and their well written stories on a variety of different topics. And yes, you’re right to say that with human picking the stories, the content may be subject to personal bias or we prefer to think of it as personal taste. But bloggers are humans too, they wrote the stories and there may be bias or differing opinions involved as well. To us, these voices are what makes blogs so interesting. Blogged.com’s goal is to find high quality content and hidden gems in the blogosphere, whether they are news, opinions, information or just humor. Our new focus puts the spotlight on some of these amazing bloggers and showcase their unique perspectives through a visually appealing and simple interface.
Blogged is a piece of crap. They rank their blogs by some subjective evaluation of their “Editor”. That is junk. Even if people vote, it doesn’t seem to have any impact on the search results.
Perhaps they are overwhelmed, but the backwards ranking system they have doesn’t make any sense. I’ve tried to search for blogs on here but you have to go down multiple pages to find the good ones. Something that looks good doesn’t necessarily mean its the best, user input is what does that and they don’t have a lot of users to boot.
Glady’s,
Thanks for the elaboration. I am currently starting a venture that heavily relies upon source/selected blogs, articles, featured stories, and any other written content aggregated from various online publications around the world. My personal opinion, and the approach I’ve taken with my venture, is that your readers want to see 2 main things: 1) They want to discover new information which will inevitably spark their own opinions, and 2) They want to this new information presented in a humanly voice, a voice that is passionate, creative, honest, opinionated, and direct. To your point, blogs are all about personal expression. Biasness is the key element to a heavily trafficked, popular blog post. Cheers buddy and good luck!
Best,
Ryan
http://www.readtheanswer.com/index.php?RTA=web2
I think that Blogged.com will struggle. Too much info to keep up with.
Techmeme is irrelevant. If it wasn’t for TC constantly giving Michael Arrington’s best buddy Gabe this much free publicity, it would be just another crappy website.
One thing is missing from Blogged. No RSS Feeds?
Whoever works for blogged please include my new blog to your list
http://www.techlusive.com
Thanks!
So I went to blogged and I liked it. I think this will be good for news from sites that aren’t NY Times, WSJ, Reuters. Sometimes I just want to read something fun and not the same old press release crap.
Did you even go to the site?
I’ll give a Blogged a shot! You say they don’t have the resources to keep up with the millions of blogs. Well who the hell has time to read the millions of posts on those blogs. You? Cause I don’t?
I hate techmeme! What a mess!
Not bad. I will see if we get any traffic
Actually I quite liked the site. Nice clean and enticing layout, some reasonable stories. Unfortunately it’s a bit US-centric really. Would be nice if they had a UK version and some other localised sites. Seriously, “Soccer” bottom right. It’s called football damnit, you use your feet…
Good luck.
DeafRead has been doing this for almost two years - fortunately because the site focuses on deaf blogs, we don’t have millions of blogs to filter. People take their occasional stab at DeafRead (personal bias and the like), but this has been proved again and again: technology cannot replace human judgment.
Add my blog as well… http://www.gothamtechminute.blogspot.com
Not bad. Thanks for sharing. Will give it a shot. Don’t know if I will be overwhelmed with info or actually retain it, but an RSS reader would have been nice.
FK
The biggest thing I see missing from news aggregation sites is the fact that the stories have to be timely and socially relevant. (i.e CNN covers breaking news and focuses on stories they estimate their audience will value. Part of this estimate is based on the media’s conversation with itself).
People are social and want to read what everyone else thinks will be important. “Niche” news sites miss out on this fact by pushing readers into a group of one.
Techmeme’s conversational structure highlights the social relevance of a story (people are talking about it). Google news also focuses on conversation (multiple sources covering the same story). Blogged does this too, which is good. They will also be pushed toward technological solutions as mining a database of blogs will become unwieldy, which I think is the way they should head anyhow if not already.
Hello guys, for every body who need the RSS Feed for Blogged.com home page. Here you go:
feed://feedity.com/rss.aspx/blogged-com/V1dWVVQ
Anybody who want RSS Feed for the Blogged.com/technology may subscribe here:
feed://feedity.com/rss.aspx/blogged-com/V1dWVVs
Anyway, talking about “human-powered techmeme”, me and my friend in Jogja, Indonesia are also working for this thing. But frankly speaking, our definition on the word “human-powered aggregator’ is not in the same meaning like what Mr. Kincaid or Blogged.com had defined here.
So instead asking some guys working on the background, we’re going to utilize Gabe Rivera’s techmeme and all blogger themself. But with a plus … plus … plus of course.
Look, I’m not kidding here. But you should wait for us since we dare not to give it a look until we finish it later before september. Hmmm, I hope you don’t consider me as a liar or spam.
For a brief shot, please visit our beta site:
http://blogleagues.com.
Thanks for Mr. Kincaid for this announcement.
@ nick gonzalez
Your URL probably worth a thousand dollars. You must be “that next” lucky guy.
i found the site useful. and it looks nicer than a lot of news sites.
kinda makes me wish i had a blog :-P. keep up the good work TC!
news.ju690.com…the similar site in Chinese…But the blogs are monitored by machine.
Good luck with all that maintenance…
for a much more refined approach, please see Polymeme — polymeme.com — it attempts to be a Techmeme for the “intellectual” Web. It tracks only 25,000 “most important” blogs and focuses on areas like economics, environment, architecture, etc
We tried signing up but you have to add a verification code to your homepage, which is one of those things we’re not too keen on doing unless we know there’s a real reason for doing it… is it really necessary?
Using humans to do the work of computers - isn’t that taking a step backwards?