I’ve taken a look at Kinja, the new blogging aggregator/digest site, and while it’s nicely put together, it’s clearly aimed at the novice. I also feel it’s a little exploitative.
Users sign up — optionally giving away some personal information — and are then requested to insert some website addresses of blogs they want to monitor. (Given most blogs don’t have particularly friendly URLs, this is somewhat primitive way of doing it. Why not at least allow the option of letting users enter the name of the blog and then have Kinja dig out some matches? You can, however, add a bookmarklet to your browser to add sites you visit to your Kinja list.)
Once that’s done, a digest is displayed of postings to those websites. (A digest basically means the first couple of sentences of each post.) When I put in two — this one, and my partner’s — and while nine of my postings showed up, none of hers did, so Kinja is already a nasty word in this household and I’m in the doghouse.
But more intriguingly, the postings are interspersed with sponsored links. In other words, Kinja is filching material from other websites — some of which may be supported by ads — and then putting the content on their website, and adding their own ads. Is everyone going to be happy with that?
Loosewireblog is not ad sponsored, but if it was, I would have to confess I would not be delighted to find that everyone was reading it on Kinja instead. It would be like hosting a party and find that everyone had come in, grabbed some drinks and headed across the hall to another party with cooler music.