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?
