FeedBurner, the Chicago-based feed management and advertising company, is looking to get into organizing blog feeds with a project called the FeedBurner Network. The FeedBurner Network looks to better organize similar blogs into categories. Check out a "Venture Capital" feed example here. In organizing the long tail of blogs into categories FeedBurner could then target advertisements into each of the channels. The idea sounds interesting and draws some comparisons to BlogBeat produced by Pluck and Squidoo. Brad Feld, a FeedBurner investor, recently explained the way the network would work:
"A FeedBurner Network is managed by a coordinator. At this stage the coordinator is the gatekeeper for the network, although it will evolve so that all members of a network can promote other potential members. As a result, the content is "filtered and selected" by the network coordinator (and ultimately members) so that there aren't "fake" Venture Capital blogs as part of the network. The result should be a higher quality network and a quick and easy way to find “Venture Capital bloggers.”"
TechCrunch also recently wondered:
"The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic."
There are a few products already trying to organizing and categorizing blogs online. Technorati, blog search engine, currently leaves the categorization of blogs up to the users while Sphere, another blog search engine, takes an algorithmic approach. It sounds like FeedBurner, who handles just about everyones feeds, will use its feeds to manually identify and organize the blogosphere. Hmm, organizing the worlds information, that sounds like a familiar mission. I don't see FeedBurner manually organizing the entire blogosphere since it is so huge and growing larger everyday but I can see benefits for offering bundles of like feeds to advertisers and potentially other publishers for syndication.
