Drowning in Weblogs? Or has your fear of the deluge left you thirsting for what everyone else says you're missing? Kinja, a new portal service (http://www.kinja.com), scans and collects news and commentary from selected Weblogs and arranges this in browseable categories. You can also create customized personal digests and track target writers or blogging colleagues. The service boasts "no knowledge of RSS or syndication standards required; no reader application to download." Begun in 2003 by Nick Denton and Meg Hourihan as a project to simplify navigation of Weblogs, the Kinja company incorporated in October 2003 and launched the beta portal this month.
The basic set of "Editor's Digests" cover the following topics: Showcase, Tech, Science, Baseball, Food, Sex, Gay, Politics, Liberal, Conservative, Media, Movies, Music, and Books. Under each category Kinja displays excerpts, harvested and edited automatically, with links to the full entry. Kinja editors specify the Weblogs for the established digests, but users can customize the targeting to their own suggestions.
By signing up and registering for a free account with Kinja, users can designate Weblogs of interest to them and receive customized digests. Reports circulate that, in time, Kinja may allow users to open up their digests to public access, adding users to Kinja's editorial team, so to speak.
Unlike usual news readers, which access RSS feeds for samples, Kinja sometimes adds indexing from HTML code on the front page of a Weblog. Kinja contends the centralized index approach allows distribution of excerpts that operates more efficiently for both Kinja and Weblog owners. Since it allows Weblog owners to bar access, it has reason to encourage them to favor Kinja access. Kinja encourages users to suggest new sites, which they add regularly.
Kinja's team has considerable experience in Weblog and consumer-oriented Web projects. Meg Hourihan, Kinja's project director, was co-founder of Pyra and a co-architect of Blogger, the first mass-market Weblog publishing system. Nick Denton co-founded First Tuesday and Moreover Technologies, and backed Weblog media projects, such as Gawker and Gizmodo.
