Keep an eye on them aggregators…

November 22, 2005

We’re all looking (since yesterday) for how this blogging thing is going to evolve and the Seattle Times looks at a new service called Gather:

The idea is to tap the exploding blogging community not only for
breaking news, but for expertise and commentary in niche topics such as
fly-fishing or fuel cells.

Blog aggregation, the art / science of picking out the choicest pieces of blog content and serving them up to people, is where the big media money will be made, according to some (including the guys who run Gather). Services like Digg and Blogniscient are picking up a big (slightly geeky) followings and are brilliant – but how to bring blog content to the rest of the world?

As Gather’s founder puts it:

"The challenge [with blogs] isn’t getting people to publish," said Gerace, a
seasoned Web entrepreneur. "The challenge is helping people find really
great content."

It’s a model where recommendations and participation earn users points that can redeemed for rewards.

I like the idea of aggregation services and I understand that people are going to try all sorts of things out, but rewards sends a shiver up my spine and makes me think of Beenz. Beenz* meaning dotcom hype incarnate, rather than Heinz..

I’ll still give it a try though.

Thanks to Weber Shandwick’s Robert J. Ricci who mentioned the Seattle Times article on his excellent new Son-of-a-pitch blog.

* You can buy the old Beenz website now for US $300k, a good Christmas present for dotcom nostalgists flushed with web 2.0 VC funds?

Antony Mayfield

Public notebook

5 responses to “Keep an eye on them aggregators…”

Ben Ruedlinger

November 22, 2005 at 10:32 pm

Great post! As you can imagine, we at Blogniscient agree that categorization and ranking of blog information is the way to achieve our goal of getting hundreds of millions of internet users as hooked on blogs.

To get an idea of where we see things going, check out our blog ( http://blog.blogniscient.com ). In particular, I wrote an article a few weeks ago entitled ‘A Vision For Blogniscient’ which outlines our goal of becoming the portal to the Blogosphere for millions of users ( http://blog.blogniscient.com/2005/10/30/a-vision-for-blogniscient/ ).

Ben Ruedlinger, PhD
President, Blogniscient, Inc.
http://www.blogniscient.com
Antony Mayfield

November 23, 2005 at 10:28 am

Thanks for the comment and the link, Ben. I look forward to hearing more about Blogniscient’s Article Ranking System (ARS)and how it works.
SpunUK

November 23, 2005 at 1:13 pm

Interesting thoughts. For me, the fundamental question is one of content credibility. I will happily listen to/read a blog from a journalist or an accepted independent ‘expert’. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I don’t think there’s any way of assigning credibility to an author, currently. Yes, the memes are out there but what can we rely on for the information we need to retain and share?
Antony Mayfield

November 23, 2005 at 6:30 pm

“Don’t believe everything you read on blogs”, eh? has a familiar ring to it…

I think that just as people take into account the bias of the paper they are reading they will take into account the bias of the blog.

Blog content for the time being is complementary to mainstream media in the way that many consume it.

For instance, I have a “news” folder in my RSS aggregator, but it’s mainstream media that feed into it. The other folders bring together TV, telecom, mobile, PR, marketing, and other blogs and I go to them for interesting finds and conversations.

I wouldn’t necessarily rely on any old blog for facts – not without checking its source. But then again, if I was really being thorough, and I had a lot riding on the judgement I was making based on those facts, I would check veracity of important information from any media.
SpunUK

November 24, 2005 at 12:59 pm

I agree, in part. But at the moment I see blogs as a group of conversations. Don’t get me wrong I love conversations and we all learn a lot from having them. However I quite like to be told the facts from sources I trust (generally in mainstream media). And I believe that a lot of people will continue to consume media in that way.