A New Kind Of Blogging?

A new blogging website was launched yesterday which includes one or two interesting features that might catch on elsewhere.

JoeUser.com, launched by Stardock Corp, is basically a free blog service. But it also:

• Automatically posts the newests articles on any JoeUser.com site on every other JoeUser.com page;
• Has a ‘SlashDot-style’ Peer review function. Readers can give particularly well written article bonus points by rating it as “insightful”. High scoring articles automatically receive additional coverage and syndication on the site;
• Has a band of editors cross-posting some of the best postings onto the site’s home page: This allows “the home page itself to act as an on-line magazine complete with multiple categories of stories on virtually any topic”;
• Audience Control. Bloggers have control over who can see their articles (just themselves, everyone, or selected users and groups such as friend and family only).
• Blog Groups. Users can band together and form blog groups in which the combined articles of individual members form the content of a new blog site within JoeUser.com.
• Popular blog site and article tracking. The top blog sites, top articles and top bloggers are automatically listed on every page so that as users gain popularity through their articles, they continually gain additional coverage.

Some of this is quite interesting, and almost sounds like an OhmyNews approach, whereby postings compete for attention through quality and timeliness. But while I can see their intention is to leverage the power of individual blogs to build up, and draw traffic from, other blogs on the JoeUser.com network, its success will rest on critical mass. If you don’t get the quantity and quality, everything will end up looking a little dank.