Blogged.com, a news blog aggregator and directory, is adding real-time functionality to its site to engage users. Launched in 2008, Blogged was originally a Yelp for blogs, acting as centralized place to find blog ratings and reviews in many categories, including technology, entertainment, business, sports, culture, and politics. Soon after, the site also started to aggregate the most interesting and popular stories from across the blogosphere via a human powered staff.
Today, the startup is trying to add more real-time features to its site in order to make the user experience more rich. Blogged is adding a real-time commenting feature, which is similar in theory to JS-Kit’s Echo product, that lets you comment on blog posts in a real-time stream that is continually updated without having to refresh the page. In order to comment, you need to sign into the site with a user name or you can use Facebook Conenct. The site now lets you Retweet Blogged.com com stories. Any responses to the Tweet will be pulled back in to the Blogged comment stream.
Blogged.com has also added a ‘Live Chat’ feature that lets users see which of their friends are online and create a single users or multiple user discussion room about a news event or article. And bloggers can bring discussion streams in the comments to their sites with an embeddable widget. Any comments made on Blogged.com will show up in real-time in the widget.
Blogged’s real-time features are definitely innovative and engaging but the blog’s biggest challenge will be drawing users to its site. It faces competition from a number of popular news aggregators, including Techmeme, which is generally recognized as the definitive resource for breaking stories and trends across tech blogs (the site has similar offerings for politics, sports, and gossip).