Blogged.com Rebuilds

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Promising to help you ‘find better blogs’ is Blogged.com. The directory site has just launched some new features and improvements. Most notably, they do a better job of highlighting interesting blogs over several niches. The goal appears to aggregate news and information that is well-written, though not necessarily accessible through mainstream media.

Among some of the content currently on the homepage:

Everything I Learned About Personal Finance I Learned From WALL-E

White Collar Steroids

5 Terrible Life Lessons Hollywood Loves to Teach You

Sure, you could visit Digg or any other wisdom of crowds Website, but the new Blogged design is highly readable with content being hand-picked by a team of editors.

Submit your blog here.

Blogged.com new blog directory officially launches

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A(nother) new blog directory has officially launched today. Blogged.com offers ratings and reviews of the blogs in its directory, apparently based upon the quality of writing and how often the site is updated.

Blogs are initially reviewed by the Blogged.com “team”, but if enough visitors rank and review the blog, then that takes precedence.

Additionally, there’s a social networking element to the site, whereby visitors can bookmark and share blogs, and provide feedback. Blog owners can place a widget on their site and encourage their readers to vote. As usual, the whole thing relies upon links and traffic, so the widget is hardly a surprise introduction.

The site currently claims around 200,000 blogs indexed, though a great many of these don’t appear to have been reviewed yet, which (depending on the size of the team) is understandable.

I noticed that several of my own blogs were already included in the directory, without me submitting them. Interestingly, one was using a very outdated URL which forwards to the new domain name (I kept the forwarding in place when I moved to a dedicated domain over two years ago). Also, the RSS feeds don’t seem to update very frequently — one of my blogs still shows the latest entry from five days ago.

Additionally, my site about families and relationships is — according to Blogged.com at least — related to a couple of gambling sites plus the interestingly-titled “Webster’s Is My Bitch” blog. It would be interesting to find out a little more about how the ranking and related algorithms work — if the “Related Posts” plugin on my WordPress blog acted like that I’d give it the boot!

Will Blogged.com succeed? Will it get the advertising revenue it (presumably) needs to survive? Does the world need another blog ratings directory? Like many new sites, it has potential, but where will it be six months down the line?

For what it’s worth, Blogged.com is currently ranked around 122,000 in Alexa, and on the up, so it could do well. What do you think?

Blogged.com (via Webware)

Archiving Blogs and the Blogosphere

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As blogs are becoming a more mature medium, research into the history of blogs becomes even more relevant. Earlier this year an article by the Wall Street Journal celebrated the 10th anniversary of blogs with Jorn Barger’s Robot Wisdom as of December 23, 1997. Not only was the author of the article accused of getting the history wrong and re-writing history it also heated up the debate on what the first blog was. (Note: the site is not up anymore, but here’s a useful resource.)

As Rex Hammock points out there is no single history of blogs and argues that “everyone should write their own version of the history of blogging.” As blogging is a practice that has shaped itself over time it is nearly impossible to point to one single blog as “the first blog” in retrospect. Blogs evolved out of a practice that is still developing and shaping itself. The debate surrounding the article also showed how poorly the blogosphere is archived and how difficult it is to conduct research on the history of blogs.

As much as the blogosphere is focused on time, the web is oblivious to time.

[Read more…]

EatonWeb to Phase Out PageRank in its Metrics Computation

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Google’s latest PageRank update caused a ruckus in the blogosphere because many high profile or popular blogs have had significant drops in ranking. While experts will tell you that PageRank is not the end-all and be-all of blogging, it still is a big factor, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising. This means advertisers still look for sites with good PR juice, and ad placement rates are still PR-dependent in many cases.

However, there are other metrics by which you can determine how good a blog is performing. Earlier this year, Splashpress Media relaunched the EatonWeb Blog directory and introduced the momentum metric.

Now, EatonWeb is radically changing the way it values blogs’ performance by devaluing the role of Google PageRank from its own algorithm, mostly because of how Google manually penalized sites in the recent PR update.

Google has been systematically introducing the equivalent of theoretical epicycles to its display of PageRank to the public, and we think it’s about time to face the facts. You can’t manually penalize hundreds of influential sites and expect to be used as a reliable source of information any longer.

In fact, we believe that PageRank epicycles are chinks in the Google armor and that Google needs to make a major strategical decision going forward to preserve its influence in the webmaster community. And in the end, it’s going to come down to whether Google can accurately determine the value of each independent link, buffering the outflow of poor quality links, rather than inaccurately painting an artificially depressed picture of site authority.

Google PageRank is no longer considered a reliable indicator of importance in the blogosphere. In this light, EatonWeb is not necessarily taking PR completely out of its measurement, but only devaluing the weight of PR in the EatonWeb metrics.

The EatonWeb directory measures blog peformance using over a dozen individual metrics from a variety of sources. The EatonWeb momentum metric gives a measure of relative growth over time at any given point. The overall metric, meanwhile, is the result of combining the strength and momentum metrics, and shows a blog’s overall quality. This is considered the best means of valuing a blog taking into consideration both age and growth in one measurement.

Splashpress Media Acquires Blog Search Engine

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Splashpress Media has recently acquired yet another blog-related new media property: Blog Search Engine. Originally owned by Loren Baker of Search Engine Journal, the deal was done for an undisclosed amount via private bidding.

Blog Search Engine is described as “a living and breathing search engine of blogs which brings you posts from over 10,000,000 blogs in our IceRocket powered search results.” Relevant results are listed in reverse chronological order–blog style.

Splashpress Media plans to overhaul Blog Search Engine with the help of design guru Thord Daniel Hedengren, who has done several other designs for the network’s various blogs and portals. The site will then be re-launched as a service that will compliment the EatonWeb Blog Directory.

Disclaimer: Splashpress Media is the owner of the Blog Herald.

EatonWeb Portal Relaunched

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Recall that a few months back, we wrote about Bloggy Network selling its blog directories. Splashpress Media was fortunate enough to have been handed over care of the EatonWeb Portal after a private bid for the site. EatonWeb is the oldest directory of blogs on the Web, and we are proud to announce its re-launch.

Over at Performancing, Ryan Caldwell describes some innovative touches that were added to EatonWeb in its re-design, and why EatonWeb is “a blog directory that matters.”

In our view, a blog’s strength is not its only virtue. We also set out to measure a blog’s dynamic momentum over time. Healthy blogs should either maintain or grow their measured strength over time.

The cool thing about EatonWeb is that it organizes blog categories by strength and momentum. This is great information to have on several levels. For one, it provides blog owners with weekly feedback on their blog’s progress, and allows a blog owner to set concrete goals. Additionally, it gives blog buyers, sellers and advertisers detailed information to help evaluate the overall value of a blog.

By separating out strength and momentum, EatonWeb also provides the “little guy” a chance to stand out in the Momentum section of the directory. Whereas it might be difficult to compete on the level of pure strength, the little guy has more room for growth.

The point is that growth is as important an indicator and metric as strength is. So even if your blog doesn’t have millions of readers yet, your blog’s growth can still be substantial as your traffic, pagerank and other indicators improve through time. The small guy actually has a better chance at growth compared to the big guys whose growth may have already reached a peak/plateu.

Ryan also posts updates over at the EW Blog where he talks a bit about EatonWeb’s strength metric, and why EatonWeb matters not only for bloggers, but also for readers and potential buyers and advertisers.

And that’s just the start, as EatonWeb promises to constantly improve and introduce new services to bloggers.

BlogCatalog employs social media to raise funds for non-profits

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BlogCatalog.com is launching a social awareness campaign to benefit DonorsChoose.org on May 28. The campaign asks directory members to write about DonorsChoose.org and raise funds for the non-profit organization.

DonorsChoose.org is a non-profit Web site that brings teachers and donors together to fund specific student projects that range from “Magical Math Centers” ($200) to “Cooking Across the Curriculum” ($1,100). Any individual can search teacher proposals and fund specific projects, which are tax deductible.

We’ve asked our directory members to provide a specific link in their post so we can track the success of our program, but anyone can participate
“Internet social networks from MySpace to Facebook are receiving a ton of media and Internet attention, but we have yet to see an online social community come together to raise funds for a good cause,” said Anthony Berkman, president of BlogCatalog.com.

Berkman’s idea is to challenge directory members to draw attention to and raise funds for this underserved non-profit organization. BlogCatalog.com has set a goal to raise at least $25,000 for DonorsChoose.org, which is a member of the Omidyar Network. The Omidyar Network is a mission-based organization established by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar and his wife, Pam.

Technorati acquires Personal Bee

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Technorati announced the acquisition of Personal Bee, a service that allows its users to collect and publish news, entertainment and information from across the web. The terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

“With the addition of the Personal Bee technology, we are creating tools to facilitate the growth of this Live Web, which is the conversational part of the Internet that is dynamic, rather than static,” said David Sifry, founder and CEO of Technorati.

“By joining forces with Technorati, we are adding flexible publishing capabilities so that everyone can find conversations, track up-and-coming ideas and stories, and customize the Live Web in any way they like,” Ted Shelton, founder and CEO of Personal Bee, added.

Shelton is joining the Technorati team as Vice President of Business Development.

BlogCatalog adds social networking tools to boost readership

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BlogCatalog recently added social networking tools to its blog directory aimed at boosting traffic and online connections among its 73,000 members. It’s a feature that would allow each other to connect, interact, share ideas and drive traffic towards each other.

“The feedback so far has been over the top. It’s very exciting to witness so many bloggers interacting, forming new connections and receiving increased traffic. Bloggers who have joined the BlogCatalog social network are now seeing 3 to 5 times more click throughs to their blogs,” says Angelica Alaniz, President of BlogCatalog.

Bloggers are not the only benefactors of BlogCatalog’s new social community, blog readers also benefit. According to Antony Berkman, head of BlogCatalog’s future vision group, “over 80% of BlogCatalog’s traffic comes from people searching the directory for interesting and useful blogs. For surfers looking for blog content, BlogCatalog’s social network acts as a filter or human search engine.”

British blogger launches FuelMyBlog online community

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Not another online community, you cry? Yes, this time it’s FuelMyBlog, a community for bloggers that’s so new it doesn’t even have a fully set up user account system yet. How cutting edge is that (or is that just ‘unfinished’?)

Kevin Dixie, based in London and La Rochelle, France, has created the blogging community to allow bloggers to publicise their own blogs for free, and have visitors vote for them.

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