Name: Blogged.com
Category: Blog Directory
Launch Date: February 1, 2008
Founded By: Kenneth Yeh and Gladys Kong
Location: Alhambra, CA

What is blogged?

Blogged.com, at first look, is a blog directory. Their tagline is very consumer focused: "find better blogs", but the service (like technorati) plays both sides, offering blog discovery for consumers, and increased visibility for blog owners.

But let’s hear what they say:

Blogged.com is a directory that offers ratings, reviews, and comments on a categorized list of popular blogs. Our blog directory is completely free to use and does not require any registration or sign up process. Blogged.com also offers a social network community that allows bloggers and readers with similar interests to connect with each other. This service is also completely free but will require users to fill out some basic sign up information.

The Consumer Offering: Find Better Blogs

At its core, blogged is a categorized and ranked directory of blogs. If you’re looking to find a blog to check out, you can go to the blogged.com home page to see the following categories (each with a list of subcategories):

• Technology
• Entertainment
• Shopping
• Business
• Sports
• Family & Home

In addition, you can browse by "topic", a listing that shows a list of the most popular categories:

The Blogger Offering: Visibility

If you’re a site owner, you’ll just need to submit your blog, and the blogged.com team of human editors (much better than caterpillars) will check out your blog and decide where your blog belongs. Once accepted, here’s what a typical listing looks like:

(click for full size image)

The profile includes a thumbnail image of the blog, a tagline, the category, relevant tags and related blogs. On the "social" side, the blog is also given a ranking based on an editor’s review (ahem, 9.0), and viewers are given the option to write their own review.

Below what you see above is a short list of recent posts from the blog:

 

The Social Part

So, you’ve added your blog. Nice job, tiger. Now it’s time to look at the social component of blogged.com. Here’s the profile page:

How Does It Compare?

The big competition for blogged.com is technorati. So let’s take a look side by side.

Finding Blogs

Take a look at the following home pages:

Well, this one is a little bit "apples and oranges." Sure, they’re both fruit. But different. Technorati is focused on topics and breaking news. They go directly to the blog posts getting the most attention. Technorati is more immediate.

Blogged, on the other hand, is more category focused. If you’re just looking for a new blog about, say, gadgets, blogged makes sense. If you’re instead looking for a post on the new firmware upgrade for the iPhone, technorati might be a better choice.

The Blog Profile Page

Techorati has some features lacking in blogged.com:

• Blog reactions- see what other blogs have said about your blog
• Authority- A metric showing how many other blogs link to your blog
• Rank- How your blog ranks compared to every other blog in the directory

Blogged.com has something that isn’t available through technorati: human editors.

The User Profile Page

Technorati is focused on blogs, and sees people as tangential, whereas blogged.com is more focused on bringing people to blogs. Though I have to admit, I haven’t explored the social networking features of blogged.com, I can say with a degree of certainty that it does exist. Where technorati’s personal profile pages solely link to that individual’s linked blogs, blogged.com is centered around a person whether or not they’re a blogger.

Summing It Up

Well, blogged.com is certainly taking a different approach than technorati, but technorati has the benefit of, well, existing for a long time. I’ll be very curious to see how much traffic blogged.com generates, and whether people will find it more useful when looking to find something new to check out.

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