The idea behind BlogRize is that the “wisdom of the crowds” works best if you have the right crowd. While sites like Digg.com have chosen to go mainstream, BlogRize believes that finding the best content from the web should be a more personal experience. To achieve this goal, BlogRize’s solution is to build news communities based on the blogs you like reading the most…blogs like the one you’re reading now, for example.
About BlogRize
You may have heard about BlogRize’s launch earlier this month, when they kicked off their private beta with pre-built communities for a handful of top sites, including ReadWriteWeb.
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.
Our BlogRize Community
By focusing only on the news that a reader of ReadWriteWeb finds interesting, for example, you wouldn’t have to sift through loads of posts you don’t care about to find the best news. Instead, the content you find is relevant to your interests.
Determining Relevance
BlogRize is different than aggregators like RSSMeme and ReadBurner, as those sites only focus on one thing to build a popular page – number of shares. But to become “popular” on BlogRize, an article is rated using a more sophisticated algorithm.
Without giving too much away about that process, we can say that the algorithm uses more than one factor. Instead, it looks at factors which include the article’s popularity, relevance to readers, and attention data, among other things. What this means is that an article from another technology-focused blog would have a good shot at becoming popular on ReadWriteWeb, but it would take a lot more for an article from, say, TreeHugger.com, to achieve that same level of popularity.
BlogRize’s Voting Process
The first thing you’ll notice about BlogRize is that the voting system for articles is a bit different than what you’ll see on other social news sites like Digg or Mixx. Instead of just voting for a story, the news item is classified as “interesting,” “funny,” “insightful,” “lame,” “disagree,” or “facts wrong.” This system was created by BlogRize’s creator, Jesse Spaulding, as somewhat of an experiment to see if he could get people to vote in a way that has more meaning and offers an opinion.
The system could use a little work, since terms like “interesting” and “insightful” are somewhat similar in meaning and because stories can, obviously, be both. Also, voting for things as “lame” seems a bit juvenile. However, for now, the system remains, although Jesse hints that he may be working on a slight modification of this interface in the future.
BlogRize Voting Buttons
Join Our Exclusive BlogRize Community!
Although BlogRize is still a private beta, they’re now opening their doors to fans of ReadWriteWeb, and are offering us 1000 invites to distribute to our readers. To get access, just click this URL: http://www.blogrize.com/join/readwriteweb.com?code=readwriteweb. You can then began sharing and voting for the stories that interest you in a community filled with other blog readers like yourself.
