Blogged Archive

We initially reviewed blog directory Blogged earlier this year. It’s a human curated blog directory that provides a (somewhat bogus) score for each blog. Today Blogged is back with their launch of a news portal site. Blogged editors will pull breaking news and the most compelling stories from their content categories (technology, entertainment, sports, etc.) and then displays the stories on the frontpage.

Here is how Blogged compares itself to the other news sites like Google News and Yahoo News along with the “meme trackers” like TechMeme:

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 algorithms to identify and present related stories as told by cliques of bloggers related to a particular industry. User-generated news communities such as Mixx, Digg, and Reddit showcase popular stories daily from across the Web as saved and voted on by individuals. Blogged.com is the only community that features the top qualified stories, representing all popular topics, organized by categories from around the blogosphere, combined with a full informational directory that includes rankings, reviews and recommended reading for each blog.

Today’s launch by Blogged seems very similar to what Blogrunner offers except that it’s human curated versus machine-driven. From a gathering the news standpoint, it’s basically like Mahalo. Both Mahalo and Blogrunner create tag pages, Mahalo uses their staff and volunteers to find links, Blogrunner uses computers to find the links. Blogged seems to be more in the Mahalo style but without the tag pages.

I don’t know how large the Blogged team is, but my only question is whether they be able to stay on top of all of the breaking news across so many categories and be able to bubble up the news in (near) real-time? If so, awesome. Also, I hope they will provide diversity in the blogs that they pimp.

They should add a social layer on top of the news – since they know a lot about each blog, there’s a wealth of information they could layer on top of the news and create a community effect on top of the news.

Everyone consumes news in different ways and the one-page category portal-style overveiew should work well for a mainstream audience.

Blogged is taking a cue from Jason Calacanis and his Mahalo project to create a human-edited blog catalog. Rather than organizing the blogs by inbound links like Technorati does, Blogged has “human editors” to score each blog.

So far they claim over 200,000 English-language blogs in about 20 categories. Each blog they rate has a page with information about it along with the latest posts from the blog feed (though the feeds seem off by 2-3 days). I guess their goal is to use Google (much like Mahalo does) to get rankings for each blog which will drive traffic to the site as I can’t see many blogs linking to them (except those with very high scores).

CN ranks a 9.4 which pushes us to the 2nd page on their technology and Internet rankings. The note regarding the rankings suggest that they are based on the following categories:

• Frequency of Updates
• Relevance of Content
• Site Design
• Writing Style.

They don’t show a breakdown so I can’t even explain where we (or anyone else) lost points. It’s a great way to keep pumping the top blogs – especially if “frequency of updates” is actually scored. A blog that might write 1-2 awesome posts a day will score lower than another that just scrapes news all day which means they will never be discovered. To some extent, Blogged has “defaults” like on Netvibes or Google Reader.

It looks like the “related sites” is off a bit too – checking a variety of tech sites, the related sites seem to be half outside of tech. For example, on the CN page, Online Latin Dating Site and Whisperings From The Winds show up as related.

I am not sure that Blogged’s future will be bright if they are only about pumping the few top blogs instead of trying to provide visitors with the best content suited to what they are interested in. More than anything, discovery should be the key for Blogged. Get a user in via a search or widget, and get them out to discover other blogs in the same category.

Users can rate a site (it requires registration) and if enough public ratings differ from the editorial rating, then the public rating will become the default for that site.

The idea of a blog catalog that offers user-generated ratings has some potential though Blogged will need to prevent gaming to make sure the directory remains clean. The information is presented in a much better fashion than on Technorati.

Rafe from Webware and Kristen from Mashable have additional commentary on Blogged.