Rediff is set to launch a one-stop site for bloggersIf you are an avid blogger and have been hopping from site to site to indulge in your passion, there’s good news. Rediff has announced a new feature to its site that may well be a one-stop shop for blog surfers. The new feature is called the Blogshowcase. “Currently, 5.2 million people go to blogs every month and their number is increasing at the rate of 83 per cent,” says Manish Agarwal, Vice-President, Marketing, Rediff.com. It’s for this tribe that the company has launched the new service. A sneak peek into the feature reveals that the mainstay of the Blogshowcase is its ease of use. So established bloggers don’t need to change their platform; those who blog using wordpress or blogger.com don’t have to shift to Rediff blogs. Instead, they can give their blog web address and that of their Really Simple Syndication (RSS) link. Once this is done, all new posts from the blog are automatically updated in Blogshowcase’s list. This is where the casual user steps in. Instead of registering, he can directly start scrolling through the new blog posts. He can then select a particular post and read it from the blog. If he likes the post, he can vote for it. The post with the most number of votes is automatically placed in the top stories’ slot. Similarly, blogs with the maximum number of votes for its posts become part of the top blogs list. Even though the feature seems similar to digg, del.icio.us and technorati sites, it is fundamentally different. Agarwal explains: “Here the reader can’t post, only the blogger can. Unlike in digg, were anyone can dig and the second guy (who posts the link) gets recognition, here the person who write gets recognition.” It is expected to be a part of the website in two weeks.
