Blogged tries to compete with TechMeme, Manually

Bilal Hameed | 18 Views

Blogged, a blogging directory that was launched last year, is trying to have a shot at TechMeme. The twist about all this is that Blogged is trying to achieve with human hands what TechMeme does with computer algorithms, that is try to pick up the latest and hottest stories in the blogosphere. The company has hired a group of editors, ten to be specific, to hand pick popular stories from around the blogosphere and post them in different categories such as technology, entertainment, sports, business, politics and humor.

The problem that Blogged face in this endeavor is scale. The amount of data that they will have to scan would be huge. Currently there are one million blogs in their blogging directory and more than 100 million blogs around the world, if we take their figures for granted. Bloggers are required to submit their blogs to Blogged directory themselves, and typically response time ranges from 1-3 working days. If we assume that every blog publishes five posts a day on average, scanning through all the posts of the blogs in their blogging directory alone would require 10-15 days. Now this figure is fundamentally flawed as it assumes that Blogged receives one million blog submission requests a day and respond to them in 1-3 days. I kept the assumptions flawed to emphasize the fact that if Blogged takes 3 days to respond to a few hundred blog submission requests a day, how can they scan and identify several million blog posts in real time.

Now let us assume that Blogged’s editorial team limits themselves to a few hundred selected blogs alone. The problem with this is two-fold. Firstly this would create a huge bias and Blogged results would never be trusted by a wider audience, which in turn would limit the widespread adoption of the service. Secondly the nature of the blogosphere is essentially democratic, which means that you don’t have to be amongst the top blogs to break a story or start a discussion. Anyone can come up with something meaningful and rest assure that the others will find him. Blogged manual hands on approach ensures that the possibility of finding stories broken by the average Tom and Harry are virtually none.

Blogged’s current approach could be compared to a Google, where search results are returned by Humans sitting behind PCs in Google offices. So each time a search query is submitted, a human manually decides the most relevant results and than sends them back to the user. Will you ever use or invest in such a system ?