Top10Media, an active group of content companies (see coverage here), is launching a new copyright registration and management service for blogs called Lisensa on Monday.

Lisensa is not helping bloggers find splogs and other copyright infringers (see Copyscape and the upcoming Sentinel for help in that area). Rather, like BlogBurst, Lisensa will help bloggers syndicate out their content, with or without a fee, to third parties who would like to use it legally.

Lisensa makes it easy for bloggers to choose an appropriate Creative Commons license, and select specific terms for non-commercial and commercial use. Republishing fees can also be resent. Lisensa handles the license agreement and collection of payments. The basic service is free; Lisensa takes 10% of any fees generated.

The basic idea is a good one, although if the end-game is to generate an additional revenue stream for bloggers, I think BlogBurst is taking a better approach. BlogBurst isn’t about copyright management - rather they’ve created very good buyer tools to encourage use (content suitability review by humans, APIs for syndication, etc.), and have closed deals with prominent print publications (Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, etc.) who really need access to cheap content to fill out their publications. Ultimately, Lisensa needs to help enforce copyright laws against infringers as well as promote paid use to be of much use to bloggers.

Top10Media, parent company to Massachusetts based TopTenSources, a human edited blog aggregator, has raised $3.5 million in a venture round led by Highland Capital (see our previous coverage of TopTenSources here). They are also announcing their acquisition of Blogniscient, a TechMeme-style blog news aggregator. We compared Blogniscient to TechMeme and other competitors in October 2005 and again in February 2006.

Top10Media also acquired StyleFeeder in June 2006.

The human edited blog highlight site TopTenSources will announce tomorrow that they have acquired the social shopping site Style Feeder. I really like both these companies and am excited to see how the partnership develops.

TopTenSources is lead by long time technologist Halley Suitt. The site is based on human editors selecting their favorite 10 blogs on a wide variety of topics, from food to blogging to Second Life.

Style Feeder was created by Philip Jacob, a coder with experience at several prior startups. The service uses some classic Web 2.0 tools to create a highly usable shopping experience. A javascript bookmarklet lets users tag items sold on any site and populates an image field by first asking that the product image is clicked on - very nice. URL and description are autopopulated and users apply tags. The item is then added to your Style Feed, a wishlist page that can be tracked by other user’s interested in your style and shopping proclivities. Users can join topical groups and add a box of small images from their wishlist to their personal website elsewhere.

Style Feeder is not currently monetized, but developer Phillip Jacob told me that ideas ranging from affiliate links to private label versions for large online communities are being considered. Halley Suitt told me that the degree of integration between the TopTenSources site itself and Style Feeder is yet to be determined but that TopTenSources is happy to consider itself a company with diverse offerings beyond its flagship site.

I’ve thought that TopTenSources was under appreciated for some time now and I will be excited to see where they go next.

Top 10 Sources, a human-edited blog index, announced a management team today.

Halley Suitt is CEO, Wendy Koslow is Editor in Chief and Indigo Tabor is Technical Editor in Chief.

From the site:

Top 10 Sources is a directory of sites that bring you the freshest, most relevant content on the Web. We know it’s impossible for anyone to keep track of the 20 million+ online sources of information. So our editors search Web 2.0 — blogs, podcasts, wikis, news sites, and every kind of syndicated sources online — by hand. Our Top 10 lists are updated frequently as great new sources come online.

The service has been heavily criticized by Mike Rundle and Om Malik (and subsequently defended by Dave Winer and John Palfrey) for copying blog posts. Adam Green argues both sides (see comments below for his further thoughts).

MY opinion: Top 10 Sources properly attributes and links to the original blog content, and they allow blogs to opt out. No problem.

And it is an excellent site for finding news. Combine this with Memeorandum’s or Tailrank’s ability to group conversations and we’ve got a real winner.