Is this the return of the web directory? Launching today is Blogged — a new service and directory that catalogues blogs on the web. The blogosphere probably hasn’t had a great directory since the early days of Technorati, and unlike Technorati, surprise, surprise: Blogged is completely human-edited.
The service is simple, and if you were a user in the early days of Yahoo! or DMOZ, you probably will not need to jump through hoops. Divided into 20 categories, ranging from Travel to Technorati to Society, is the whole blogosphere (well, the worthy part of it at least.) Each category lists, from best to worst, the blogs within it, and every blog is given a title, description and editor’s rating.
While Technorati used to be a great way for newbies in the blogosphere (or at least, blog reading) to find out who’s who of what, I don’t think it is any longer. Blogged fills this space with a very simple concept, and it does a fantastic job of it. It’s easy to underwork a niche when what your doing is wholly dependant on human labour, but Blogged does a fantastic job — a la Mahalo is doing for the web and current events.
That brings me to the question, is human-edited the way of the future? Is the web simply too diverse and crowded with mediocre and bad quality content, that the age of the spiders and crawlers is long-gone, and now humans are needed for that job? While I think the whole web probably needs a mix of both human and technology for it to be navigatable and searchable in the best way, I think the blogosphere is perfect for a wholly human-edited project to fit that job.
