The Concept Bloozle – the Startup that never was - Part II

Continued from Bloozle – the Startup that never was

Bloozle is an information segregator (our own twist over the rising din of ‘aggregators’ online) which would allow the user to surf through the sea of blogs according to his/her tastes.

The idea is simple – also a clever combination of various existing concepts like Social Bookmarking, FriendFeeding, RSS Readers, news rivers, co-ranking (digg/stumbleUpon):

• Users would subscribe to their favourite blogs in our custom developed feed reader.
• They would read their regular blogs and would rate and tag blog posts they read
• Incoming blog posts would also be automatically tagged based on the labels/tags which the authors attach them when posting. Going forward the system will also perform intelligent tagging based on factors like source, number of times a word appears in the post body, words in the title etc.
• The rating and tagging would be aggregated by our server and then blog posts would be rejigged (segregated) – grouped under tags and ordered by ratings.
• Users would subscribe to their favourite tags (such as technology or sports) - also called TagFeeds - and they would receive the top-most rated blog posts which have been tagged under the same tags by other users of their site (from blogs which they don’t follow).
• While users would be able to take care of their information overload (surf your own favourite blogs and read other popular stuff through tagFeeds), we would use the same meta-data (rating/tagging) to generate our blog-newspaper (christened bloozPaper)

It all looked pretty good on paper – and I believe it still is – but only for the lack of users. We made a series of mistakes, which resulted in few users using our site and ultimate demise of the whole concept for the lack of traffic and therefore the metadata which was the core need of the concept.

Coming Next - some mistakes and other environmental factors which lead to the untimely demise of our product and stillborn startup.