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.