Their description:
“Blawg Republic is a real-time search engine that monitors the legal blogging community every hour.”
My technical description:
Blawg Republic gathers RSS feeds from legal-related blogs, aggregates them, and renders them as html for your reading enjoyment.
My business description:
It takes content from lots of people and compiles it on one website. People come to read all the content in one place, and occasionally click ads that make money for the site.
The idea of aggregating content is nothing new. Moreover was doing this with news sources at the same time blogs were being invented. Now aggregators are everywhere. Even I’ve made one. By creating a destination where all the content comes together (with advertisements) the web marketer benefits from the all-important great content, but avoids the nasty work of having to create it. It works like a radio station: the station plays music to get people to listen to the ads, and the musicians don’t mind because it promotes awareness (and thus sales) of their music.
So why not make a whole bunch of these aggregators and brand them for each industry? I suspect that’s exactly what Condensa has planned. Their website reveals nothing about law but focuses on web marketing. Kinja could do the same thing by picking up some additional domain names and changing the style sheets (the code that controls the looks of a webpage) to look completely new.
In the end though, if you don’t have original content, you better make a very useful tool. Think of all the failed search engines and link pages. Actually, think of the successful search engines. Yahoo is all about games, news, stocks, discussion boards. Google is fast developing all kinds of ways to keep you looking at their pages.