The Integrative Stream

Blog Content Marketplaces

The Boston Globe has an article about a local startup called gather.com, another entry into the social networking/blog content aggregation marketplace.

My initial problem with the concept: when I went to the site, I couldn’t immediately figure out what it was all about. Some exploration showed good stuff, like podcasts from American Public Media (the producers of Marketplace on NPR, among other things), but it wasn’t immediately evident how the site could be useful to me as an information consumer. Search, quite simply, is easier to manage than browsing a content hierarchy, and if I’m going to search, it will take a lot to pull me away from a classical search engine like Google. After all, if I’m doing research, why would I want to limit myself to just blog content?

There may be something here, and I’m going to look at it in more detail later, but on first brush I don’t think it’s a big deal.