Comments - Latest Popular Stories, Instablogs Community by Ankit

Sridhar

Sridhar — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Hi Ankit,

Excellent post. I only agree with few of your points though.

Response to each of your ponits.

1) Network Wide Tagging: Tagging can be easily abused by blog owners themselves. What i suggest is a technology which can parse the blog content and tag the posts automatically. I have a solution to this problem but addresses only few categoroes of blogging topics.

The other alternate solution to Tagging is searching the blogs by specific search terms. The results displayed should be arranged by date with latest blog first. Again the blogging network should be localized and the search results will be relevant to that particular local community. At this time Technorati, google search results are not that relevant, if we search about India.

2,3,4,5) I am responding to your points 2,3,5. Aggregation of RSS feeds should not be like a kichdi or jumbo. We need categorization og blogs or blog posts (ideal). This way readers can specifically go to that category of interest and read all posts. Categories could be politics, sports, entertainment, geeks etc. This way, we can reduce the strain of readers in helping him move to the blogs of his choice. Once a user narrows down to his blogs of choice, we can then implement a rating system which will then help other readers to narrow down further to authoritative blog posts.

I am not a fan of customized RSS feeds. Feeds should be much more dynamic and should display results by specific search term.

Rewarding Readers is a difficult task though. Yet i agree that he should be duly recognized. This will only encourage him to come back.

7,9,8,10) Personalization of blogs can be made redundant if a perfect rating system based on Title, description, hits and content is implemented. THis users can arrange the blog posts with highly rated blog posts first. The reason is that over time bloggers improve their quality of writing and will give them a chance to get rated better.

Community style adding links is the most abused system. This will create proliferation of links. All the time bloggers themselves will add links at various places like desipundit, digg sites etc. In the long run, these posts can be banned due to duplication of content by search engines.

We have implemented few of the above features and are on our way to implement the rating systems.

I am not sure if enewss.com is the kind of site your looking.

I would encourage you to explore this site and we have received good feedback from recent blogcamp chennai meet on Sept 9,10

Best regards

sri

Chubbs

Chubbs — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Ankit, great post! I agree with your assertion that blog networks are becoming somewhat irrelevant.

I’m starting to think that the evolution of the blog network to the second generation really evolves the ”blog network” concept into a social network. As much as I hate to say it, something more like MySpace would take blog networks to the mainstream.

As for some additional features, I think that including a ”recommended list” by different users would help with user interaction. In other words, you can ”subscribe” to what your favorite comment poster ”recommends” and see those posts in a specialized section. Of course, the user would ”recommend” a post by bookmarking it for his own purposes first.

Ankit

Ankit — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Yeah, thats a greta idea Chubbs.

Recommendations: by all users. It can be added to their custom profile page. People can recommend their fav. author, reader, or anyone’s recommendation of various other posts, and those posts can be view in a section. More the recommendations, higher the story.

Mike

Mike — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

BLOG NETWORKS ARE GOING TO FAIL

Even if you guys get 3G of Blog Networks, nothing can save you.

And why I think Blog Networks will fail.

1. Solely dependent on Adsense/YPN revenue.

2. A good writer will find running a blog independenty more profitable then joining a network and sharing his revenue.

3. Those guys who share 100% revenue, don`t know themselves how they are going to earn.

4. All great blogs in their respective niches have launched years ago, there is no scope for new and amateaur bloggers.

5. A-listers have already started their networks, which leave no space for small time players.

6. The model of blog networks is real dumb. After the sale of Weblogsinc, everybody tried to ape them. But Google, Yahoo and other big companies are not interested in Blog Networks.

I can go on with my list for whole night, but the point is Blog Networks are doomed.

Just tell me one thing, what your blog networks give extra to bloggers.

Server Space?

Wordpess software?

Side wide linking ? ( I can buy that for $20-$30 per site)

Advertising deals? ( I don`t find any reason, why I wouldn’t be able to get it myself. Blogads, Adbrite, Adsense, CJ have already been invented)

Why the hell anyone sane would be interested to join a blog network is above my head.

Mike Rundle

Mike Rundle — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

This type of stuff should have been on the minds of network owners the past year and it’s unfortunate that few networks are innovating in these ways. The major problem I see is that ”blog networks” aren’t innovating in their model at all, they simply took the magazine or newspaper publishing model and moved it to the web without using the great interactive and two-way features the web has to offer. Simply ”publishing” a site with ”authors” to the web isn’t innovating or interesting, it’s just switching mediums from print to the web.

The web lets you *do* things with your data besides just publishing it: you can interact with it, make it more meaningful, adjust its message, merge it with other data, and allow people to bring that data into their online life rather than segregating it out and relying on them to visit your site in order to have access to it. No networks are currently doing anything with their data besides dropping it into a static webpage and that’s very disappointing. When I commented about how networks need to move to user-centric models for their distribution, I meant it.

Tomorrow 9rules is launching our network-wide search app — over 30,000 entries from our members fully indexed — and we’re merging that with data from YouTube and others because we’re trying to add more value to the user’s experience. We’re working hard to take 9rules to the next level but this is just a first step.

Ankit

Ankit — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

I agree with you Mike on this. That will be a great feature for 9rules, indexing over 30,000 entries and launching a search app.

Many networks I believe, have thousands of entries. Network wide search will surely can help readers to get to the articles they are looking for. It will also help the visibilty of individual blogs.

A great feature, all second generation blog networks should have.

BrAD

BrAD — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Excellent Post...

Though I agree with each and every point, and also with further additions by Mike and Chubbs, but how is it possible to integrate into any existing setup. I am not sure if this discussion is going to be fruitful, since most of these are impossible to implement in any setup. Otherwise Gawker and WIN would have done it months ago.

Mike, I am eager to check your new 9rules network wide search. Wish you luck.

David Mastio

David Mastio — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Check this out: www.blognetnews.com. Serving bloggers by organizing little slices of the blogosphere to make life easier for blog readers to find the good stuff.

Mike Rundle

Mike Rundle — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Hey Brad, 9rules Search launched, check it out!

As for the integration, anything is possible it only depends on the time you have and the design/development chops you can muster. I talked on the 9rules Blog about how the entire 9r Search application only took me a few days of work and that’s from someone who hasn’t written an SQL query since college. All the tools are out there now — open APIs, RSS feeds, pre-build Ajax libraries, pre-build effects libraries, rapid development frameworks like Django and Ruby on Rails, all you need is data to work on and some elbow grease and anything can be built. Network-wide tagging is just a field in a database and a query, customizable RSS feeds can be developed using one PHP file, profiles are just a few more database fields — it’s all very doable.

Gawker and WIN shouldn’t be the ones we’re looking to emulate as far as innovation because they don’t innovate at all and that is their weakness. Look at 37signals and their Basecamp software: built in a few months with a few developers it’s now taking on the largest project management applications in the world, no doubt worked on by hundreds of people. Quick, smart, agile teams can do things that larger entities cannot do in a timeframe that is extremely short. The entire 9rules infrastructure and company have been run by 3-4 people devoting only 5-10% of their time per week and look where we’re at now... anything is possible you just have to have the drive to make it happen.