When BlogRize, a blog community and aggregator, first launched earlier this year, we gave it a very positive review. BlogRize is an interesting mix between Digg, Techmeme, and ReadBurner, though with a stronger emphasis on individual communities around blogs (like the RWW community here) and recommendations.
During the last few months, BlogRize’s founder Jesse Spaulding has been working on a major redesign of the site, which he is rolling out today. The new design features an enhanced voting system, updated ranking algorithms, and a lot of updates to the user interface that make using the site a lot easier and more fun.
Communities
BlogRize creates a community of readers around specific blogs and then generates an individualized Digg-like site for each community, where the ranking of the stories depends on the recommendations and votes of other group members (among other things). While you can submit stories to BlogRize directly, the main conduit through which users add stories to the system is through recommendations in Google Reader.
User Interface
A lot of the user interface updates to BlogRize are quite useful. You can now, for example, toggle story previews and see in-line comments from your friends right on your BlogRize homepage. This new version also allows you to quickly mark a story as read by simply clicking on the white space around the story.
On nice addition to BlogRize’s feature set is its ability to find your profiles and activity on other sites through Google’s Social Graph API. This makes importing your profiles a lot easier.
Most importantly, however, Spaulding has streamlined the voting system, which was one of our few complaints about the earlier version. Unlike Digg or Reddit, where you can only vote a story up or down, BlogRize allows you to mark a story as ‘interesting,’ ‘funny,’ ‘disagree,’ ‘seen this already,’ or ‘inaccurate.’ BlogRize also looks at links to stories from other blogs and takes these into account when it ranks its stories as well.
Join the RWW BlogRize Community
Jesse told us that his focus while developing and redesigning the service was on giving bloggers an opportunity to create and promote their own blog communities, and after this redesign, BlogRize has become an every better place for blog readers to get together in a relatively small but focused group. Thanks to this focus and the self-selection of the group members, the recommendations are always spot-on.
If you want to join the community of RWW readers on BlogRize, just click here and sign up for the service.
