Blogburst Blog Syndication in Action

I first heard about Blogburst when Frank Gruber mentioned it on his site in February, and immediately signed up. Blogburst, a division of the feed reader company, Pluck, syndicates blog content to news sites. Bloggers register their sites with the service and news sites then pick blogs to syndicate as additional content on their sites. Bloggers aren't paid for their content, but do receive links out of the deal and more exposure for their stories. As far as I can tell, Technology Evangelist hasn't been picked up by any news sites yet, but I did find an example of a site that has. According to a more recent article by Gruber, Blogburst now has over 1,000 bloggers signed up and deals with the SFGate.com and WashingtonPost.com among other mainstream media companies.

The geek travel blog, fittingly named Geeky Traveller is being syndicated from Blogburst onto the San Francisco Gate . I noticed this in our web logs after receiving some traffic from sfgate.com. It turns out that the Geeky Traveller picked up a Technology Evangelist article written by Brian, wrote about that article, then had the article syndicated onto the SF Gate through Blogburst. A syndicated article about an article:

I don't know if this is a good example of Blogburst in action or not. It's simply the first I've seen. Does content like this enhance the content published in-house by the SF Gate and syndicated from sources like the AP and national columnists? As I understand it, the SF Gate pays blogburst for this content.

Also, I haven't figured out why news sites like the SF Gate wouldn't seek out and work directly with bloggers rather than use Blogburst as an intermediary. Does anyone understand what Blogburst is bringing to the equation other than an editorially reviewed directory of blogs? I'm still trying to understand that side of things.

I've been trying to understand how newspapers lower their risk through this platform. When I applied and was accepted on behalf of Technology Evangelist, all I had to do was fill out a short form with basic site and contact information. I'm sure someone took a look at this site before approving us.

It seems like the people making decisions on behalf of media companies would be regular blog readers (at least, they'd better be) so they should have a good idea who's creating content that's relevant to various sections of their site.

Vetting content makes sense, but it's not clear how much vetting Blogburst actually does. If their system was capable of flagging posts that wander from what the publisher was expecting, that would be something valuable.

Perhaps Blogburst is translating the blogger's feeds into a media friendly feed from the various forms of RSS & Atom? That may have some value.

Comments

1. Posted by: Brendan on May 25, 2006 12:19 AM:

I imagine Blogburst brings the holy grail of a one-stop-blog-shop to traditional media outlets.

Why deal with potentially hundreds of different bloggers when you can deal with one aggregation source?

.. sf gate also get vetted content - they don't have to worry about a blogger suddenly railing on in colourful detail about something completely random, appearing on the front page.

Zero risk is something traditional media sources seem to want when aggregating content from outside their own clique.

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