After writing about new blog search engines from Bloglines and Gnoos this week, Chris Alden (Rojo CEO) pointed out to me that Rojo also quietly launched a blog search service earlier in the month. Rojo has focused on building out its feed reader in the past – this is its first real dive into blog search. It looks like it went nearly undetected: there are no comments or trackbacks to the Rojo blog post announcing the product (although Library Clips caught it). Rojo blog search can be accessed from the search bar on the top right of the Rojo home page. Rojo takes a stab at solving the blog search relevance problem (which I discussed in the last paragraph of this post). Results are ranked according to freshness, total subscribers to the underlying feed, total “mojo” votes (a Digg-like feature – see here for a description), whether people have tagged the story (a sign that they liked it) and total number of times the post was read. This is an algorithm approach to relevance, similar to what Sphere and Bloglines have done (although with very different data points). And it seems to work – relevance is very good. Rojo is trading off quality with depth of the index. Unlike Technorati, Rojo is indexing just a couple of million blogs. Whether a blog is in the index is based on, first, subscribers from its feed reader product (if someone subscribes to a blog, it’s automatically in the index) and second, additional blogs that they’ve determined to be of high quality, through a spidering process. Results are presented along with a voting and tagging feature, and the “+” symbol can be clicked to see the full blog post. This is just a first pass at search. Chris tells me they will be relaunching with a new interface in a couple of weeks. More on this then. → Read More

Rojo added a great new relevance feature tonight, and the result is a sort of personalized digg. You can now view your feeds by date or relevance, with relevance being determined according to other users votes (think diggs), total reads and total user tags. The result – a nice way to sort through your daily feeds to find the most popular posts. Rojo has also added a number of categories – breaking news, entertainment, technology, etc., with the included feeds editorially picked and the ranking by relevance and freshness. This is a good way to find popular posts from sources that are not included in your feed list. Rojo is ahead of the pack again in terms of features, and relevance is a hot topic right now. The question is whether this is going to be enough to drive user adoption in the extremely crowded feed reader space. Richard asks a different question: “I wonder if this will wake Bloglines out of their slumber?” → Read More

On Friday Rojo will be officially releasing Feedshare, a new way for blogs to promote themselves on other blogs. The service is available now to test. The idea is that a blog include a Google Adsense-type ad unit on the site (I’ve included this in the bottom left sidebar of TechCrunch). Two ads are served in the unit and there are vertical and horizontal ad units to choose from. For ever two ads served, the publishing blog gets an impression on another blog. FeedShare is a service that helps bloggers with similar interests promote each other. As a blogger participant you give exposure on your site to other blogs in the network, and in return your blog will be promoted on similar sites in the network. You give exposure by displaying “Feed Listings” (see examples) which display the name and description of blogs and other feed publishers. When visitors click on these listings they can then subscribe to the RSS or Atom feed for that blogger or publisher in any one of several feed readers. You then create a listing for your OWN blog and for every impression you donate to the network on your blog, you will receive a listing on someone else’s blog or in Rojo.com. The goal is to help build the feed subscriber base to your blog, increasing awareness and traffic to your site. Rojo plans to sell the second ad to third parties, first on a cost-per-impression basis. Later they may experiment with cost-per-click and cost-per-subscirber models as well. Tags can be set by the blog publisher to control the types of ads shown on the site, as well as what types of sites your ads will be shown on. Ads link back to Rojo and are recommended for subscription to Rojo or other feed readers. A discussion forum for Feedshare is here. → Read More

Company: Rojo Previous Profile: June 17, 2005 Location: San Francisco Rojo launched two new features this week: expanded tag functionality and top 100 feeds. Top 100 Feeds: Rojo now lists the top 100 feeds subscribed to by users. The top ten include the usual suspects, which at least shows that Rojo users are pretty mainstream v. other readers. They call it the Rojo 100. You can also view the most read feeds for any given tag. This second part is more interesting. The top 100 is just another list – not super interesting as a stand alone feature. However, the ability to type a tag and see the most popular feeds based on the tag is, actually, quite useful. In particular, we like the results for the tag “Web2.0“, which lists Read/Write Web and TechCrunch in the top two spots (looks perfect to us!). Now you can see the most read feeds in Rojo at any one time. Call it the Rojo 100. This list will change all the time, as Rojo users reading habits grow and evolve. Lists are all the rage these days, but while the list of the top 100 most read feeds in Rojo might be interesting, what’s MORE interesting is seeing the most read feeds in a particular topic area. To find the most read feeds in any number of topic areas, simply search for a feed tag–that is a word used to describe an RSS feed–in our feed tag directory and sort the results by popularity. This way you will find the most read feeds in a particular subject area in Rojo. Turning attention into serendipity–that’s what we are about. RUGFEED: Rojo is one of the only feed readers to allows tagging of feeds and posts. They are starting to release tools to help users find new content based on other users’ tags. Check out popular feeds based on the tags you select: This week in Rojo a cool new feature: The Rojo User Generated Feed Directory! (RUGFEED??) Can’t find the RSS feed you are looking for? Our feed directory of around 100,000 feeds has been categorized by YOU–the Rojo user. In the “Tag” section of Rojo there is now a “Feeds” sub-section where you can find the most recently and most frequently tagged feeds in Rojo. You can also scope feed lists by All Users, or just your contacts–or yourself. The most commonly → Read More

Company: Rojo Location: San Francisco, CA Launched: Closed Beta – October 2004, Open Beta – April 20, 2005 Funding: “Rojo received seed financing from TPG Ventures and individuals such as Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway. Rojo’s most recent round of funding was lead by BV Capital and TPG Ventures.” What is it? Rojo is a web-based RSS Reader (list of all here) that combines great “standard” RSS feader features with tagging and social networking. It is an interesting experiment that is getting a lot of buzz. The service is completely free for users. It includes adds in the user interface. In their own words, “Rojo means “RSS with mojo” and in this spirit our company is dedicated to providing the best RSS feed reader around so that busy people can manage and read content as efficiently as possible. Our vision is that the next generation of feed reading requires new forms of organization so we built in the ability to tag your world, your content, your feeds, and even your friends. We believe that analytics and community based features are what make feed reading accessible and appealing to technophiles and new consumers alike so we provide RojoBuzz, which tracks which webpages are most linked-to by the feeds you read. With Rojo’s community features you can share stories, feeds, tags, contacts, and profile information with your friends and colleagues, making it easy to find, discover, and share interesting content. This is what we are dedicated to providing. This is what we are passionate about. “ Signup was easy (with standard email confirmation), and I was able to import all of my feeds from bloglines (although this process could easily be simplified – I would much rather just tell them “bloglines” and my username, which some other web-based RSS readers do. Export of feeds via OPML is also offered. Rojo’s magic – what makes it stand out from the crowd – is the ability to tag posts, feeds and contacts. You can use those tags to sort and find your content, but you can also use them to find other potentially useful content from others, including your contacts. Adding contacts and sharing tags and feeds is very simple. Taggin of posts and feeds also partially solves the ranking problem with blogs – it helps the cream rise to the top. There are some other excellent reviews of Rojo out there and we’ve → Read More