Regator, a new blog aggregator that hopes to reduce the blogosphere down to consumable chunks for the average user, has launched today in private beta. The site acts like a combination between Digg and a standard RSS reader, allowing users to vote on the most popular stories drawn from 3,000 blogs that have been hand-picked by Regator editors. TechCrunch readers looking to try the site can get one of 100 invites here by entering the code “techcrunch”.
The Ajax-heavy site seems best suited for users who aren’t interested in heavy-duty blog reading. There’s no way to add an RSS feed that isn’t already on the site, and the sharing options seem to be limited compared to more mature offerings like Google Reader. Each story has voting arrows which allow users to determine the most popular articles – a nice touch, but one that may turn Regator into a Digg-clone instead of a more general news reader.
Beyond standard text search, Regator offers an audio and video search across its indexed blogs, but the results aren’t always appropriate – a video search for “Yahoo” yielded a YouTube trailer for the movie Wanted as the second highest hit.
Regator will see competition from a number of blog aggregators, which include Blogged, which launched a similar feature yesterday, and TechMeme, which uses an algorithm rather than user input to rate top stories.