Blogsjam aggregates top Indian blogs
Blogsjam is a very interesting initiative. This product is not competing in the field of RSS Readers. They are focussed in two niche areas. First it brings order to the ever growing blog content. And second deliver content to blog owners/users using widgets. They have organized around 200 blogs into 30 channels like Indian Technology and Startups, Bollywood News and Gossips etc. This team is being led by Ashish Baldua and Manish Baldua of Citipals. Citipals is website catered to review and recommendation of movies, restaurants etc.
A reader can go through the channels and select the news of their choice. On clicking, user will be directly taken to the blog. This will drive more traffic to the blogs. Most users read their favorite blogs from reader hence affecting the monetizing opportunity for the blog owners. (Of course there are ways to monetize the RSS feeds). Blogsjam has a headline and a brief excerpt. It does not store the whole post. Blogsjam keeps adding blogs to existing channels as well as add new channels. The update to the channels is maintained manually and not automated using spiders. Here is a widget for Indian Technology and Startups
The most interesting part is their widget, through which they deliver content to other blogs and websites. This will drive more traffic to the blogs. Right now there are three widgets- Public Channels Widget (this is what Blogsjam deliver), Customized Channel Widget (user can select the list of blogs/syndicate contents of their own blog). Here is an flow diagram for Blogsjam.
The channel is fixed. Whatever is in the channel comes through the channel. The classification of widget is too broad and it may not deliver context sensitive content as desired. If I use Indian Technology and Startup Channel, I get all the posts in that channel. The widget is not sensitive enough to shortlist posts which will be most suitable for context of the content. Users can get only public channel widget from the site. For customized version of the widget they have to email Ashish. Right now I could not find a revenue model for this site.
Sphere is a company which is doing work on similar lines. They have products for publishers, bloggers and advertisers. For bloggers they intent to give contextual content so that the interaction on the blog increases. This also helps to acquire new readers by being a part of the network.
I am sure blogsjam will have these thoughts in the back burner. It can aim to be an “adsense” of Indian blog content. And they can have interesting revenue model (cost per click/ cost per view) like adsense.
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Email excerpt from Ashish (Cofounder Blogsjam)-
That is an extremely insightful review. Even helpful to us.
Thank you very much.