11.23.07

Review: rssHugger.com - blog catagorization and promotion

Posted in Uncategorized at 1:57 pm by Robert Horvick

I was checking RubyCorner’s updated feed and came across a post on rssHugger.com.  In a nutshell the service (manually) reviews and categorizes submitted blogs into high-level topics (such as Technology, Finance and Humor).

It’s a similar idea to other web directories except that in addition to a site link it also provides a feedlink (which makes it similar to sites like bloglines, technorati, etc)

When I first read about the site what I expected to find was the ability to drill down to a category such as “Technology -> Programming -> Ruby” and subscribe to an aggregated feed of all the blogs in that category (similar to RubyCorner.com) but instead it is just a list of blogs with direct links to the site and feed (with less granular categorization - “Technology” exists but not “Programming” or “Ruby”).

Likewise I also expected to be able to subscribe to aggregated lists based on tags - but that does not seem possible either.

I also thought I might be able to create my own aggregated feed that I could share with others.

Finally I expected to be able to search blogs in a free-form way but the search link takes me to the directory list - not an actual search engine.  That may be OK when there are only 23 registered blogs (with a goal of 250,000 the first year) - but as the number grows the ability to find interesting content is critical.

I don’t know what features are in the pipeline but right now it’s just a loosely categorized list of sites and feeds.

So to summarize - what it needs:

1. More granular categories. 
2. Aggregated feeds by category
3. Aggregated feeds by tags
4. The ability to create my own feed lists (and give me some widgets to share on my blog)
5. Meaningful search (for sites and posts)
6. More sites.

Do a few of 1-5 and 6 will happen on it’s own.

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