Welcome to BlogRize. Currently in beta testing, the site is a new experiment in crowd sourcing - one that aims to make social news a more personal experience. According to founder Jesse Spaulding, the difference between BlogRize and other similar sites is that the site contains: “today’s news, filtered by communities of people who enjoy reading the same blogs.”
Readwriteweb, one of the social communities currently beta testing on Blogrize, adds,
The way BlogRize works is by allowing members to join the community of their favorite blog or blogs. Within that community, the popular news stories are the ones recommended by the other readers of that blog. These stories will be a mix of not only that particular blog’s articles, but any articles the community thinks are interesting.
The idea is that, unlike websites like Digg which aggregate the opinion of the entire web, you can get a much more accurate picture of sites that interest me from a community of users who share my interests and who are, in essence, more like me. According the 2008 Edelman Trust Barometer, “people like me” - those who have similar interests and share a similar political outlook - have supplanted corporate CEO’s, government officials and doctors as the most trusted source of information.
In a early post, I wondered,
Does the emergence and growth of these integrated online services make it less likely that I’ll spend time wandering the halls of internet miscellany stopping on anything that catches my eye? My second question is how Yahoo!, Google or anyone else for that matter, know what I want from the internet if I don’t know myself?
Maybe the answer is that I don’t know what I want but people like me do. Instead of trying to wade through the collective opinions of thousands on Digg, maybe I’ll develop my own personal community of the like minded and they can tell me what to read.
This idea certainly has merit. There’s something to be said from having people track down things I know I would like but a website that only sources people with the same interests has the tendency to isolate a multitude of interesting, foolish and downright bizarre articles that are floating around the internet. Having only similar people decide what I should read is sort of like a popularity contest among clones. Sure we like what we see and sure we all get a nice pat on the back but we’re definitely missing out.
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This reminds me of a recent consulting engagement with a distributor of industrial supplies. The client was interested in establishing longer term and more sustainable relationships with small and medium size customers. After conducting research with these customers, we observed that they tended to (1) operate within a close knit social network characterized by trust and face to face communication, and (2) the smaller customers could feel somewhat isolated, with no external source of advice, collaboration or exchange of ideas.
To attract and retain these customers, we made a suggestion to the client that they create the capability for these small and medium size customers to interact with other small businesses that do what they do and buy what they buy. Seems like it is an industrial analog to the “people like me” blog…
Just a thought…
Comment by Chris O'Leary - May 2, 2008 8:12 am
I like the idea but not that you have to have a blog to join up. Not all of us can do that.
Comment by alex - May 2, 2008 9:40 am