April 1, 2004
Nick Denton presents... again.
Man, that Nick Denton. He's handling more domain names than Network Solutions. The creator of Gawker, Gizmodo and Fleshbot, today brings us Kinja. The site appears to be an aggregator without RSS. Indeed, Kinja claims to be able to "digest" blogs that are not RSS-enabled. Kinja's taking a role as the AOL of aggregators and aiming for users who can't or won't go the DIY route.
Kinja purports to make discovering blogs easier for newcomers; however, when I registered, the first action I was presented with was to add my favorite blogs. I'm pretending I'm a blogging newbie — so I don't have any favorite blogs yet. If my mother tried Kinja, she'd hit that page and sit there wondering what to do. It doesn't pass the Mom Test.
Being the blogging triathlete that I am, I popped in a few familiar URLs. My own (ah, vanity) and the ever-popular Scripting News. My site is not categorized with Kinja, but I did get a page full of Dave Winer's mug (and not the cactus one). I added a few more URLs and found the digest behaved in a way that I wasn't expecting. With each new addition, the digest was filled with posts from the new site, obliterating the sites I had already added. I poked around for a way to manage the digest, but the only option (as yet) is to add and remove sites. The digest page doesn't appear to be readily changeable. It doesn't pass the Tara Wants Things to Be Logical and Configurable Test.
So if Kinja isn't crystal clear for newbies, yet doesn't offer functionality for advanced users, who exactly is this site meant for?
Comments
I think the hope is Mom might find some weblogs she likes in the topics on the right side. And the whole posts flooding a digest thing is a problem that should be resolved as the beta progresses. One hopes, anyway. :)
Hmm, bugs@kinja.com is bouncing back "user unknown".
Thanks for sharing your experience. I was curious but hadn't had time to try Kinja myself. After reading what you wrote, I don't think I will take the time and effort - at least not for the beta. I do think the idea of making blog digests easier for everyone could be a good one: don't know how many times I've tried to explain *aggregator*, *RSS* etc...