Blogs and commenting aggregator fav.or.it has closed a new round of funding close to $710,00 from an angel round taking their total funding to date to around $1.5m. The UK-based startup is also launching a about to launch a new property, FeedBroker.net. This separates some of its functionality into a new site which would allow for licensing RSS feeds external to any other site, including fav.or.it, and send the lion-share of ad-revenue back to content owners – not unlike what Feedburner was supposed to do but never quite got around to it.

Launched in beta in October 2007 and public from June last year, the site – with perhaps the most annoying URL known to man, but hey… – aggregates content from thousands of blogs and websites and streams them into a network of vertical channels. In this respect it’s not unlike a bunch of Google News Channels but the difference is logged-in users can comment on fav.or.it’s platform and the comments will appear on the original blog. Disqus already makes use of Fav.or.it’s full API for commenting, for instance. Thus fav.or.it has been compared to “commenting systems” like CoComment, SezWho, Tangler, and Intense Debate. But it’s now expanding beyond this to allow brands to pay for channels that aggregate the conversation around their brand/product and use it to engage with customers. Think of it as a centralised command and control system.