Explosion of Blog Aggregators…How to Keep Up?

May 4, 2008 by 6 Comments


I don’t know about you, but I’ve seen the names of a number of aggregation sites out there. It’s a very popular space, and I have not really understood who they were or what made them tick. But my growing enjoyment of FriendFeed made me wonder about what these other sites are up to. So I put together a high level survey of several of them.

There’s a really long table below. Before that, a few notes are in order.

Selected apps: This is by no means an exhaustive list. For instance, I just got into Yokway today, but haven’t had a chance to try it out. I just came up with a list from the serendipitous finds I’ve had. I also focused on earlier stage companies – no Digg, del.icio.us or StumbleUpon.

How stuff gets in there: There are three way that blog posts and news articles are added to these aggregation sites:

  • Submit: Users add a specific web page to the site, often via a toolbar ‘add’ button.
  • RSS share: Google Reader lets you ‘share’ an item in your RSS feeds that you like, posting it to your publicly accessible ‘shared items’ page, which is tracked by an aggregation site
  • RSS feed: The aggregation site takes a feed of all posts from a blog or news site

What’s interesting: Every site has its own secret sauce for what makes it tick. I tried to find things that seemed to each site apart from others.

Experience: I rate the user experience of these sites based how much was required to use them effectively. In this earlier blog post, I describe examples of light and heavy user experiences. Generally, lighter is better, but heavy can be OK for really good, distinctive features.

The point of this chart: It’s not to praise or bury any of these apps. Just to put together a list of what’s out there. If you’re an information seeker, a writer or seeking social connections with like-minded people, then you should check out some of these sites.

After the chart, I include links to other blogs with more information, plus a few thoughts as well.

Quick thoughts in dot…dot…dot fashion:

Diigo’s people matching based on common bookmarks and tags is a really cool idea, it reminds me of Toluu‘s matching based on common blog subscriptions…LinkRiver and Reddit have a very similar philosophy, with Reddit deploying a lot more categorization than LinkRiver….ReadBurner and RSS Meme are also very similar…Shyftr may have a light experience, but I’ll admit I found the overall user experience confusing right now (they’re in beta, it will improve)…Twine’s automatically generated tags for different categories was really interesting, need to explore that more…no notes on FriendFeed, just click ‘FriendFeed’ in my tag cloud for information about it…I kind of like getting my daily Social Median emails with news updates…Blog Rize has a spare UI, but it is strangely compelling…luckily, none of my blog posts have received the ‘lame’ or ‘facts wrong’ ratings on Blog Rize…

Wrapping up, here are some blog posts to get you started on the various apps:

I may be posting about some these sites in the days to come.

*****

See this item on FriendFeed: http://friendfeed.com/e/9bdd0ad9-a377-f65d-6140-8dc4e835c6c3

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About Hutch Carpenter
Chief Scientist Revolution Credit

6 Responses to Explosion of Blog Aggregators…How to Keep Up?

  1. Robin Cannon says:
    May 5, 2008 at 11:11 am

    I’d certainly be interesting in finding out some of your wider thoughts on Diigo.

    I find myself doubting the aggregator/bookmarking sites that focus on bookmarking snippets of text or parts of web pages. I feel that a lot of blog posts and online information can be far more useful when taken in context, and these aggregators sometimes limit that context.

    Reply
  2. Stephan Osmont says:
    May 5, 2008 at 3:36 pm

    Hi Hutch,

    Thanks much for mentioning Yokway in your post! Just to clarify, Yokway is not a blog aggregator. Simply put, Yokway is a fun, new and innovative free online service, dedicated to helping people share, organize, and discover information on the Web. Yokway’s core mission is to provide the means to ease information exchange between individuals and groups. The fondamental belief is that global knowledge and the common good increases when people share what they know and discover.

    Yokway allows content aggregation as a way to automate post and facilitate the sharing of blog post among peers, but it is not the core value of the service.

    So please feel fee to enroll in our private beta, and we’ll be looking forward to getting your feedback.

    Reply
  3. bhc3 says:
    May 5, 2008 at 11:05 pm

    @Robin – I’m looking forward to trying out Diigo more. I’m really interested in the matching idea – bookmarks and tags as the basis for common interests. Great site you have, by the way.

    Reply
  4. bhc3 says:
    May 5, 2008 at 11:07 pm

    @Stephan – thanks for the clarification. I look forward to checking out Yokway. One thing I noticed from this post. Yokway got more clicks than did the review links I included for the other sites. My own learning about how readers interact with web sites.

    Reply

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