The rise of edge content continues – iNods, which launched today, is the most recent example. iNods aggregates blog and other edge review content and displays it in a centralized way for users. Unlike similar services kritX and blogcritics, which aggregate general review information contained on blogs (and are excellent), iNods is completely focused on shopping. Like the others, iNods has realized that there is a massive amount of review information out there in the blogosphere. And more is being created every day. They are harvesting that information, making it searchable, and driving highly targeted traffic right back to the blogs to read that content. They also require blog registration to include content, although they do already have fairly deep content and so I assume they have added some sources without their registration. They say that they will support microformats in the future, but at this point it is not a requirement. This means bloggers do not need to format their data in any particular way to have it included on iNods. I’d like to see these services expand their technology so as not to require blogger registration or microformats (kritX, blogcritics and iNods all require one or both of these). This is a harder problem to solve because they need to go through every blog post and figure out what is relevant to their service. Structured blogging initiatives and/or blogger registration certainly make it easier for services like this to recognize and gather the specific edge content they are looking for, I do not believe it is necessary. Existing tagging and syndication platforms are all the tools these vertical search engines need. There is no way centralized review sites like Yelp, Riffs, Judy’s Book and others can compete with the blogosphere over the long run. Those sites will also have to gather decentralized content, or become meaningless. More and more people are realizing this and writing about it – a good post by Rachel Cunliffe (one example) is here. → Read More
KritX is very raw, but they are on to something big – aggregation of reviews from blogs (the edge of the network). I wrote in a recent post (no. 9) that I’d like to see someting like this be built. Don’t look so much at the current execution of Kritx and judge them too quickly – think about the idea that they are trying to exploit. There are millions of passionate user reviews on blogs today of everything you can think of – movies, music, books, resaurants, etc. Just do a technorati search for “review” and whatever you are looking for. Of course, initiatives to better organize blog data, like structured blogging and microformats, will make this data even easier to index and present to users. kritX is combinging blog reviews and microformats with a vertical search engine to present these edge reviews to users. It has a long way to go. Authors must use microformats and tell kritX that they want their posts included (neither of these things are really necessary). But it is a good idea that can grow into something incredible. All the data is just sitting out there on the open internet, ready to be harvested. See also Blogcritics, who do something similar (although they do not require microformats, they do require author registration at the site). The plethora of ads on Blogcritics do get in the way of the user experience, though. → Read More
