Got a notice in my inbox that a new aggregation website had been launched titled TopChurchBlogs.com.
Taking a look I didn’t see anything necessarily new or innovative; looks like just a growing list of blogs that the owner thinks are “top.”
Personally, I’m a little bit tired of things like this because it doesn’t prove anything; curating a list of anything “top” is as subjective as listing out the best Starbucks drink orders during morning rush.
Sure, you could base it on metrics/analytics, but I’m still not impressed since no one’s doing anything new with the idea.
And, who are you Ryan Bell? You should have an “About” page or something! Twitter profile looks pretty empty too.
Let’s brainstorm then: What will it take for a really good aggregation point for blogs within our space?
How can we best curate them and “rate” them? Does it need to be comprehensive or niche-based?
And who should do it?
Personally, I’d be all over a service similar to http://www.postrank.com that is more objective, but perhaps with some kind of voting, rating, or commenting mechanism added. Who should do it? I wish there was some kind of church/tech blog network or something…
hehe.
your comment makes a line to the smiley. sweet.
word.
Comment deleted by request.
Can you delete my comment above? Wrong place… Thanks
This topchurchblogs.com reminds me a lot of alltop.com – automated aggregators have some value; curated content has more value, most of the time
Another fascinating aggregator, with more algorithmic “smarts” is the newly rebooted zoecity.com, which has a lil’ more of the postrank + twittered link + facebook shares factored in.. whatcha think of that?
http://churchcrunch.com/do-we-need-a-christian-social-news-aggregators/
The biggest problem with the Internet is finding information that is going to be useful to you. I think it is helpful if someone makes a list of the blogs he considers useful, even if his criteria are entirely subjective. I set up the site http://churchconferences.org/ with a similar purpose. I wanted to have a list of as many church conferences as I could find, in date order, so that I could decide the best way to spend my church conference dollars. I am no authority on church conferences, and my criteria for adding items to my list are subjective, but I still think it is useful to provide a subjectively-gathered compilation of information which might save website visitors a lot of time searching.
I don’t see the point when you already have alltop…
my thoughts as well…
We should do it.
To “rank” it should be a combination of metrics/analytics as well as user interaction (like what Facebook Pages does). I tell clients all the time when I helping them create a social media strategy that they could only have 100 fans, but if those people are engaged- really engaged and it’s a community- then it’s a win; compared to having 1,000 fans not engaging at all or very little.
As far as broad vs niche- it really depends. Maybe subcats? I mean, I’m a Christian, but I would describe my blog as a Christian blog. Would that preclude me?
There has to be something that provides content and then resource- that’s why I think 8BIT is a great place to do this. 8BIT already has a great symbiotic existence doing just this.
OK- you wouldn’t know this unless I told you- but I just went and looked at the TopChurchBlogs site- I think I just threw up in my mouth. Anyone else having a hard time reading the feeds? And why is there still NO ONE following or being followed on twitter? [End Rant]
Alltop is cool- but it’s almost too much info. Me no likey. Me want wingy…. but I digress.
So yeah.
I think that it would be great to see a solid DIGG style website for Christian websites. Sure toplists are great for finding your blogs, but what you want is a website that gives you the best content from those websites.
did you see this post on zoecity?
http://churchcrunch.com/do-we-need-a-christian-social-news-aggregators/
That site doesn’t work for me. There’s nowt wrong with “Top” type sites so long as we agree it’s purely subjective until the power(s) behind explain how their ranking works.
I’d love to have a proper aggregator but it, IMO, would have to include and make it easy to locate both the popular and not so popular blogs in its chosen niche.
Oh and careful on the dissing folks – let’s be brotherly about this and offer to help rather than rip apart.
good reminder. disrespect sucks!
You should do it.
The end.
k.
To answer the questions: niche and no.
Might there be a place for something similar to Techmeme http://techmeme.com? Content is ordered chronologically but its also very apparent as to which items are being discussed more and where. Its human curated so there is at least some order out of the chaos.
i think so.
I tend to follow influencers, not single blogs that use algorithms (or even community “intelligence”) to bubble content to the top. So my vote is for finding the people online that you trust and listening to them.
For me, I trust Gruber to share good content all day long.
haha. daring is awesome.