blogstring.com

Last week blogged.com launched their new home page, which spotlights the top stories and topics discussed in popular blogs. They’re hoping to compete with the other news aggregators like techmeme, reddit, google news, and digg. So, how is it? Well, let’s take a look:

Topics:

As you can see, the blogged.com home page grabs the top stories (as picked by the blogged.com team of 10 editors) and displays them, and stories are also categorized into the above topics.

Blogged.com vs. Techmeme

From last week’s press release:

Google News and Yahoo News feature top stories from traditional news sources using a combination of technology and human editors. Memetrackers, such as Techmeme and Blogrunner, use formulas to identify and present related stories as told by cliques of bloggers  in various industries. User-generated news communities such as Mixx, Digg, and Reddit showcase popular stories from across the Web based on individuals’ recommendations and votes.

Blogged.com is the only destination that features top qualified stories from around the blogosphere, representing all popular topics, organized by categories and combined with a full informational directory that includes rankings, reviews and recommended reading for each blog.

So, where techmeme employs algorithms to identify hot topics, blogged.com uses human editors to find topics and blogs about them. In addition, where techmeme covers tech news only, blogged covers many different categories. Let’s take a look at the blogged.com technology news section vs. the techmeme news section:

Blogged.com:

Techmeme:

The Good:

Blogged is great when it comes to finding new blogs to subscribe to. Where sites like techmeme focus their attention on an issue, blogged seems to focus much more on blogs you may not be aware of yet.

The Bad:

Though due to their approach, stories do not seem at all time sensitive (at least the top stories).

The Questions:

1. How often does the blogged.com team of editors add new stories?
2. At what point do the editors decide a topic is hot enough to elevate it to the home page?
3. How do the blogged.com editors decide which blogs to link to for a particular topic? Is it based on their own rating system?
4. Looking at the technology news page, I see blogs like Ars Technica, mashable, Gizmodo, and problogger…not exactly unheard of blogs. How do the editors decide which blogs are too popular, which are rising, and more importantly, how do they get a good mix of the big guys and the little guys?
5. Where’s the RSS?

The Verdict

Well, since blogged.com is all about finding new blogs, having a news aggregator for a home page is a great way to show users blogs based on topics of interest. The biggest question of all, however, is whether a team of 10 editors can keep up with the algorithm-based aggregators.

Full Disclosure: I work for matchmine, a company that has a partnership with blogged.com.

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