FeedBurner Testing ‘Networks’

Just stumbled upon a post from Brad Feld who is blogging about a new “networks” approach that Feedburner seems to be beta testing.

Brad is coordinating a Venture Capital network and defines networks as:

“a collection of blogs that fit within a particular topic. The goal is to create high quality collections of similar types of publishers…. 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.'”

It’s interesting to see that this new feature has been announced in this way and with no official word from Feedburner but it’s an interesting development and I’ll be watching on to see how it rolls out.

My initial impression is that it’s success could hinge upon the quality of their coordinators and their ability to keep the high quality of participants up.

update: more on this at Techcrunch who points to another of Feedburner’s investors (aparently Brad is an investor too) who is also writing about this new feature here.

Michael Arrington’s thoughts on Feedburners networks are much more articulate than mine above – he writes:

“The biggest issue around this will be what rules are used to determine which blogs are included in a given topic. It isn’t clear if there will be any real quality control – in his post Brad says each network will have a gatekeeper to make sure only blogs on topic are included, but there doesn’t appear to be any hurdle as to what constitutes a quality blog in a topic. That could work out badly. And if the bloggers and/or the network coordinator are making subjective decisions on which blogs can be included in a given network, this will end in tears. The politics around who’s in and who’s out of a blog network are impossible.”