What I’d Like to See: A Start-Up Blog Aggregator
A Mark Evans piece that muses about the possibility of a “web 2.0 aggregator” that could bring applications like GMail, Skype, and Basecamp all to one My Yahoo or Netvibes-like personalized homepage got me thinking about an only partially related idea having to do with web start-ups. But sticking with the personalized homepage thing for just a second, what I would dearly love is to have the ability to bring a few widgets right into my GMail page. GTalk, an IM application, is integrated into GMail, so why not give people a little widget for their calendar, for instance. This would make me very happy, even though I’m revealing what a slave I am to Google products!
Okay, onward. Here’s one of the things that I would love to do if someone threw a few barrelfuls of VC cash my way: run a blog that smartly aggregates blog posts everyday from web and tech start-up companies. So in other words, when MyBlogLog announces an interesting feature rollout or when Evan Williams writes (incredibly concisely) about nifty things going on at Twitter, this site would annotate it and perhaps add a pithy comment or two for good measure.
I think this would provide a valuable service for the web obsessed TechCrunch/Techmeme crowd as well as for industry insiders and journalists.
I’m a sucker for what I think of as “smart aggregation” and believe that the proliferation of web content will allow for plenty of these kinds of ideas to do well and make money when executed properly (accounting for all of the mistakes, pitfalls, acres of quicksand, and all the rest of the problems that every start-up faces!). Think about… a place that compiles the most interesting or strangest MySpace blog posts, a place for celebrity blog posts (Britney, Rosie O’ Donnell, Fifty Cent, etc.), sports figures, TV and movie personalities, and on and on.
It’s Friday. What better time of the week to let your geeky entrepreneurial dreams cry free?
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August 24th, 2007 at 4:32 pm
Could you mash this together with an OPML file of all the start-up blog RSS feeds? Check out Niall Kennedy’s startupsearch.org - each company has a profile with an RSS feed which could certainly be used to pull this stuff together.
Great idea!
August 24th, 2007 at 5:03 pm
Thanks Ian!
Yes, essentially the crux of such an operation would be the ability to pull in tons of content via rss and make sense of it. Looks like that’s the direction that Startup Search is taking, and they even run a “Weekly Web Wrap-up” which does some of what I’m suggesting already.
Hmm… now I’m getting tempted to get this rocking. Only so many hours in the day, argh!
August 24th, 2007 at 6:33 pm
Re-purposing content has copyright and compensation implications. As the Geniuses at Google (GAG) have carefully sidestepped, to date.
Hate to be a Web 1.0 fussbudget, but at some point don’t all these “mash ups” have to acknowledge that they depend upon someone else’s work to… well, work?
August 24th, 2007 at 7:26 pm
I think ideally it would be fine in terms of copyright, using links, selected quotes (nothing longer than a paragraph or two at a chunk) and smart, pithy, witty annotation!
September 1st, 2007 at 8:39 am
I do agree with the poster who raises the content approval issue.
I run dcblogs.com/live which is a local blog aggregation. It’s permission based. Not all local bloggers want the visibility a feed provides and some don’t want to participate in it. Even if you feel that copyright and fair use protect aggregators, its community buy-in that’s really critical to winning support for your model.
In terms of settng up an aggregation engine, the first hurtle is populating a database that the engine works off. There are thousands of tech blogs and any feed is going to spitting dozens of posts every minute. It becomes mind-numbing unless.
The best example of a comprehensive aggregation tool that doesn’t need a database is Digg, which relies on eyeballs. I would like to see http://tech.blogrunner.com/ or http://www.techmeme.com/ become more expansive and drill down deeper into the tech blogosphere, but my guess is that they really don’t know how to sort and measure the value of that content.
September 1st, 2007 at 10:14 pm
The more I think about it, I think that my idea isn’t quite an aggregator as much as a news service. Therefore, I believe the concerns about intellectual property or copyright won’t be an issue. Essentially, I’m looking at having a human editor (or editors) hand-select interesting things going on at tech company blogs each day and link to them with selective and concise use of quoting, and “value added” annotations provided by the editor(s) to give the site a voice and spice things up where appropriate.
December 5th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
m.. why this page loading so slow?