Most often than not, it is the smallest of necessities that spark great inventions and discoveries. The term “blog” has become quite a common place these days and it if you happen to be a part of this web revolution 2.0, it often becomes tough to make your folks understand what you are up to.
It was the search for a better platform that offers quality cooking blogs for his mother that led Mr. Christopher John Osbourne to the idea of FeedZa (Here’s some detailed dope on FeedZa). Well, I wouldn’t really call it a revolutionary product. FeedZa had almost always been around in the form of Digg, Technorati, Yahoo Buzz and also a few more avatars. However, what strikes a chord in the grey cells is that FeedZa is probably the only community voting site around that actually promotes the brand value of a site, in whole, as compared to individual stories, in the cases of Digg and the likes. I can see the potential of this concept being used in promoting individualistic brand values too. If Mike Arrington, Darren Rowse and the likes ever decide to put their Twitter status updates’ RSS feed on FeedZa, I can very well envision users fighting to vote their favorite superstars to the top.
WATBlog (WB) decided to catch up with Chris, Founder of FeedZa, and shoot him a few questions. Here is a little excerpt from the interview.
WB : When was FeedZa launched? How many monthly visitors, feed submissions and ratings do you get?
Chris : We launched FeedZa yesterday.
WB : How do you think FeedZa might be different from Digg, Technorati, Yahoo Buzz and the likes?
Chris : I think we combine both the voting on the best content that Digg has and the features of finding new blogs/content that Technorati offer.
WB : The site has an option of ‘thumbs up’ing a favored link. Why haven’t you incorporated a ‘thumbs down’ too?
Chris : Right now we do not require users to register in order to vote, so we decided to remove the “thumbs down” option….not wanting people taking advantage of the system. i.e – we didn’t want a blogger giving their post a “thumbs up” while giving everyone else a “thumbs down”
What ‘The Ed’ thinks - This is a poor reasoning because the ‘blogger’ always has the option of giving “thumbs up” to his own feeds multiple times and still manage the same effect without awarding negative points to other feeds.
WB : What if the same person hits the ‘thumbs up’ sign multiple times? Isn’t that as good as spamming? Has FeedZa taken any measures to curb misuse of the spirit of the community?
Chris : As soon as this starts to become a problem, and we acknowledge that it will, we’ll have no other option than to require registration before allowing users to comment. The reason for the delay in requiring users to register is that we wanted to start building the community as soon as possible, and think that forcing users to register may hold this back. i.e – we think that it’ll be much easier for people to realize it’s worth registering once they see an active community on FeedZa than registering when there isn’t much action.
What ‘The Ed’ thinks - This is an ideal example of choosing quantity over quality. Being a start up ourselves, I understand the problems one face and the urge to become popular fast is always on everyone’s mind. However, I fear, in want of “action”, FeedZa just might end up compromising a lot on the quality of content that finally ends up at the top. Personally, I shall always choose a site with less number of participants but quality feedback over the vice-versa.
WB : If the users are expected to rate RSS feeds, then why do you offer snippets of single posts? The same blog can have both good and bad posts. Moreover, when someone clicks on a blog’s link, shouldn’t he be offered snippets of all recent posts of that blog, as compared to linking it to the single post itself, not even the blog’s home page?
Chris : Our aim is 2 fold, to highlight great content bloggers are writing that don’t get the exposure they deserve (that’s why we list the most recent feeds on each category page first) followed by letting the community decide what content is best. I understand that not every post a blogger writes is their best work and that’s why we decided to display the new feeds first. As for the links, the title of the feed goes directly to that post while users also have the option to go to the bloggers home page using the URL link under the snippet of content text.
WB : Do you target only RSS and XML feed urls? How about Orkut, Facebook, Twitter Updates, Flickr Feeds of people popular on the web?
Chris : There will be an added feature so that users can connect with bloggers on other social sites in the near future.
Well, although Chris has currently declined to comment on what he might have in mind as a part of FeedZa’s future plans, we leave it onto you to try out their system and let us know what you think of it. What’s your verdict on Chris’ concept?
