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Web's quest for quality
By Jamie Gumbrecht |
February 22, 2009, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
GOOGLE.COM has an algorithm. Regator.com has Kimberly Turner. She is 33, an Atlanta magazine writer, and curator of blogs on the new aggregating Website. On an Internet increasingly filled with noise and fluff, she sifts through hardly updated, long-forgotten, navel-gazing diatribes to find good writing and interesting discussions. She shuffles the best into categories on Regator, making it easier for users to find quality posts sorted by topic.
Since the site launched last August, she has added more than 9,000 blogs to Regator categories, building each for quality, not quantity. Usually, she hunts blogs quietly, on the couch at home. For one week every month, she opens the site to nominations, and gets up to 400 suggestions per day.
Her rejection rate: about 75 percent.
Time consuming? Yes. But it also makes them different, says Turner, who launched Regator with her husband, Scott Lockhart, the site's designer and business mind, and her younger brother, Chris Turner, the site's techno-geek.
It was supposed to be a real estate blog aggregator (Regator, get it?), a side project for Lockhart and Chris Turner. But once Chris had written the code, well, "it kind of seemed silly," Chris said. "It wasn't that much harder." Topics range from parenting to hipsters to animal rights to cricket to gadgets to, yes, real estate.
They know they can't beat Google, which returns content broader than blogs or Bloglines, which requires readers to find their own favorites. They're not even the blog search engine Technorati, which returns good blogs, but also blogs that haven't been updated in years and never met an exclamation point they didn't like.
"We're selective in a way they're not," said Kimberly, who means that she, as editorial director, is picky. It's not unusual anymore for her to have 50 browser tabs open while she searches for blogs. The side project turned 40-hour-per-week-after-work project is adding widgets and iPhone apps. It has yet to make a dime, but keeps drawing attention: online award nominations and soon, they hope, startup money. They don't discuss traffic numbers, but admit they're grateful for the day Google's search spiders found them.
"I come from a corporate, bottom-line background," Lockhart said. "We wouldn't be wasting our time, the lack of sleep, if we didn't think we could make money."
For now, they take the idea of a family business to extremes: the three live together and hold meetings around the kitchen table. Chris, the only one focusing on the project full time, wears his pajamas to the "office."
"We're accidental entrepreneurs," Lockhart said. "A lot of people think we're 30 people working out of an office - we're three people working out of the house."
Since the site launched last August, she has added more than 9,000 blogs to Regator categories, building each for quality, not quantity. Usually, she hunts blogs quietly, on the couch at home. For one week every month, she opens the site to nominations, and gets up to 400 suggestions per day.
Her rejection rate: about 75 percent.
Time consuming? Yes. But it also makes them different, says Turner, who launched Regator with her husband, Scott Lockhart, the site's designer and business mind, and her younger brother, Chris Turner, the site's techno-geek.
It was supposed to be a real estate blog aggregator (Regator, get it?), a side project for Lockhart and Chris Turner. But once Chris had written the code, well, "it kind of seemed silly," Chris said. "It wasn't that much harder." Topics range from parenting to hipsters to animal rights to cricket to gadgets to, yes, real estate.
They know they can't beat Google, which returns content broader than blogs or Bloglines, which requires readers to find their own favorites. They're not even the blog search engine Technorati, which returns good blogs, but also blogs that haven't been updated in years and never met an exclamation point they didn't like.
"We're selective in a way they're not," said Kimberly, who means that she, as editorial director, is picky. It's not unusual anymore for her to have 50 browser tabs open while she searches for blogs. The side project turned 40-hour-per-week-after-work project is adding widgets and iPhone apps. It has yet to make a dime, but keeps drawing attention: online award nominations and soon, they hope, startup money. They don't discuss traffic numbers, but admit they're grateful for the day Google's search spiders found them.
"I come from a corporate, bottom-line background," Lockhart said. "We wouldn't be wasting our time, the lack of sleep, if we didn't think we could make money."
For now, they take the idea of a family business to extremes: the three live together and hold meetings around the kitchen table. Chris, the only one focusing on the project full time, wears his pajamas to the "office."
"We're accidental entrepreneurs," Lockhart said. "A lot of people think we're 30 people working out of an office - we're three people working out of the house."
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