Reactions to MSN Filter

There has been a bit of a buzz around the blogging community in the past few days with the release of Microsofts blog publishing network – MSN Filter – a network of blogs looking to give the inside scoop on music, sport, TV, style and technology. MSN describe it as:

‘our team of bloggers will filter the best stories, photographs, links and other interesting tidbits that you’ve sent in, as well as items that they’ve dug up.

This is an opportunity to share your insider knowledge with the Filter community and take a chunk out of your 15 minutes of Internet fame.’

It’s reader driven content edited by nameless bloggers.

The response to MSN filter has been varied ranging from the bored (rafat at Paid Content writes ‘my reaction: ho hum’) to the ‘thrilled’ reaction of Jason Calacanis:

‘Now, I’m thrilled MSN is in the game because at some point soon I’m sure they will make these Filter sites and/or Start.com the default homepage for tens of millions of MSN/IE users. Tens of millions of folks will reach our blogs via Microsoft’s RSS reader and meta-blogs. The alternative—which we are living with right now—is our blogs are no where to be found on the MSN, Yahoo, Google or AOL home pages. Having these big players move blogs to the top level will be huge for blogging.’

Another blogger writing on the topic is Richard MacManus at Read/Write Web who bounces off Jason’s post wondering who will be the first out of Google, MSN, Yahoo and AOL to put blogs on their front page:

‘My money’s on Yahoo and AOL. Indeed I have hopes that both of them will fulfil my dreams of getting paid for my writing, by opening up and inviting truly independent content creators into their fold.’

My reaction to MSN Filters is that it’s a logical move that corresponds with Yahoo! getting into Health Blogs. I’m still not sure what I think about search engines having their own content sites are but know that its bound to happen whether it’s ‘right’ or not.

My initial reaction to MSN Filter is that i’s pretty bland and boring – without too much personality. I think not naming the bloggers is a bad move. From my own experience I know that my most successful blogs are generally ones where I’ve identified myself or at least injected some of my own personality into them. I guess MSN are wanting to concentrate more upon the content than the profile of their bloggers – the name ‘Filters’ I guess gives some indication of this.

My hope is that rather than trying to dominate the blogging community that MSN (and the others who will no doubt follow) will interact with it. True blogging is generous with it’s linking and builds relationships – hopefully we’ll see this continued with the big guns interacting in the medium as publishers.