Blogged dot com

A site came to my attention from Kirby over at 3++ is the new Black called Blogged.

From the looks of it, this site allows you to search through blogs indexed by category and register your own blog in the network. Once you find blogs, you can visit them and follow them within Blogger. Looks like they're trying to create an RSS fed homepage, like Google Reader, though they've incorporated users, friends, messaging and feedback into the system as well. Email notices can let you know when you receive messages, followers, reviews and such. There's a review system in place for the people running the site and users to leave a number on a scale of 1-10, though my blog was reviewed within 5 minutes of signing up so I'm not sure how extensive the review is.

The system is certainly buggy - you start signed up to a few default blogs and followed by a couple default users - which still display on your tally page even after you remove them. There are sections to view the top things going on, but they don't seem to work either. When searching, I can't seem to find my blog and you can't edit your blog's description. Pages are also rather laggy. While the site appears legit, many of the higher reviewed pages seem either well known, pop, highly ad-supported or obviously run by robots and auto-posters, some even lead to dead links. (these may be old blogs or hijacked which makes me wonder how great the search results are) I waited a day before posting this, and received a few followers in that time - at least one of which is definitely a bot trying to gather attention to it's ad site.

Verdict? Skeptical, but there's potential.

While it seems promising, and I like the idea of a blog-only search engine, I'm not sure how reliable it is if I can't even tailor results to find my own site or Kirby's, or the concerning number of fake sites. You probably won't find me logging in to Blogged, but a little free publicity can't hurt.