Thursday, April 01, 2004

As other bloggers probably know, Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan are launching Kinja today, which appears to be some sort of blog reader. The New York Times explains how Kinja works: "After signing up for a free account with Kinja, users can enter the addresses of their favorite blogs and generate a digest - a customized blog of blogs." The Times says that Kinja will be best for people who are not familiar with blogs and are not as technologically savvy as the users of other blog readers such as NewzCrawler and Bloglines.

I don't want to be a Negative Nellie but Bloglines does everything that Kinja is purported to do, and setting up Bloglines is about as difficult as signing up for a Yahoo email account. Even the innovation of publishing your subscriptions to the public is offered by Bloglines. Bloglines doesn't have the "best digest" contest yet but I am sure they could implement it easily. This reminds Standard Deviance of when Wonkette stormed onto the scene, compliments of the Denton PR machine, to fill the supposed void of DC gossip blogs, while Swamp City had been filling that void just fine (I love the Wonkster though, don't get me wrong). I'll definitely check out Kinja, as I am always interested in what the Denton Pod People are up to, but from what I've heard so far, it's unlikely I'd bother resubscribing to all my blogs for basically the same service as I already have.

Blog-Bleary? Try (What Else?) a Blog [NYT via Eyebeam via Bloglines]