What is the purpose of blogs? My experience has been that blogs are effectively filters that direct only the most relevant and interesting issues for a given topic. I personalize my blog experience by simply using Bloglines every day and reading through all the blogs that I think are most relevant to me. It's not rocket science for me to say that there are certain bloggers that consistently post great material -- John Battelle, Techdirt, Slashdot, The Social Software Weblog, among others -- are all blogs I read from header to footer. The whole concept that something a service can return blog posts relevant to me is wonderful on face but certainly not accomplished as of now. Blogging is inherently a personal experience and the upper-echelon quality of bloggers is, despite the huge numbers of them, still a relatively small group, but perhaps not small enough for me to manage entirely on my own.
From bad personal experiences, I find the idea of websites that purport to deliver personalized blog content to be paritcularly sketchy. As much as I love blogs over the bore of something traditional like the Associated Press, the problem with blogs is that -- duh -- there is no barrier to entry and SEO'ers and spammers alike take advantage of them.
However, I do see promise in a function similar to the recently published "TrustRank" out of Stanford. Say you have a group of 100 "trusted" blogs that only link off to other blogs of value. The trusted designation would not consider trackbacks because of SEO spam. Can someone tell me if this would be feasible or realistic? How many layers deep can you go before there is abuse? There is no question that it would still be open for abuse the more layers deep you go, but even if you only travel two layers, that might be enough given the supply of high quality blogs is actually quite limited.
A ray of hope comes from Findory. Not only have they managed to figure out how to make Google's ads significantly more relevant to the user, but the core service itself of offering up custom blog selections is the best I have seen. Led by Greg Linden, the website is plain smart and could be the next big thing. The search results are by far the most relevant I have seen. For example, my query for "social network" produced almost entirely relevant results (whereas feedster.com produces almost entirely ridiculously off-topic results) and introduced me to a new blog that is now on my Bloglines list, genuinevc.com. This experience makes me think maybe there are significantly more good bloggers out there after all.
Findory is effectively a Google News for blogs that looks at only the "trustworthy" blogs, and is able to deliver personalized content. Congratulations, Greg Linden, you're the leader of the pack!
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