Enter Kinja, The New Blog Directory

Here’s another blog directory, going live today (it’s just a graphic at the time of writing this). Is it going to be different, or is it hype?

The New York Times today says Kinja, “automatically compiles digests of blogs covering subject areas like politics and baseball. Short excerpts from the blogs are included, with links to the complete entries on the individual blog sites.” Users can sign up for a free account, enter the addresses of their favorite blogs and generate a digest.

Those behind Kinja include Nick Denton, “whose small blog-publishing empire includes the New York gossip site Gawker” according to The Times, and Meg Hourihan, Kinja’s project director and a founder of the blog publishing service Blogger. (Her blog is here.)

Kinja users can make their customized digests public, NYT says, and that the best digests would be promoted at the site, making the users ”part of the editorial team.”

There’s definitely room for improvement in the way blogs, and RSS feeds, are pulled together for the reader. Reading blogs, even in RSS form, becomes quite a chore, and while there are some great blogs out there, the tendency of the most interesting ones to cover a very broad spectrum of topics makes sifting through sometimes more time-consuming than one would like. Here’s an interesting discussion about what Kinja could be, and what people are looking for.