Instablogs, the New Delhi-based blog network, recently celebrated their 1st birthday.
But apart from the usual fanfare came the announcement that they’re well on their way to taking their blog network in a new direction.
With Instablogs 2.0 – The Next Generation Blog Network they have a vision of “bringing bloggers and readers closer,” focusing on the current excitement over social media/networking.
Ankit Maheshwari, in charge of Business Development at Instablogs says:
I have been advocating for blog networks to evolve into social networks for quite some time now … The idea of metamorphosing our blog network Instablogs into a social network was in my mind from last 10 months or so.
When the new features shortly come into effect at Instablogs readers will be able to:
- form small topic-specific communities and tribes.
- conduct network-wide tagging and searching.
- utilize a newsroom for news submission/tipping and news link picking.
- view all stories in the network aggregated in one place accessible via a reading room.
- create their network of friends.
- read, rate and comment on stories.
- RSS customization for any channel, topic, writer, tag, etc.
- have their own personalized homepage.
- access Readers’€™ Rewards whereby they can be editors for any channels of their choice.
The personalized homepage is the one that attracted my most interest as well as the advanced features of RSS customization that will be on offer.
It sounds like they’re trying to keep readers at instablogs for much longer and get readers to view multiple blogs with a portal-like experience. I guess this can only be achieved if they have a wide-enough variety of topics (ie: blogs) on offer – which they have.
This is an interesting move from Instablogs and I applaud their initiative in thinking more “web2.0ish” in regards to blog networks. It seems they are going from what is really a “network of individual blogs” into a truly unified “blog network”.
Currently they have a group of 200 beta testers putting it all through the ropes before the official release date of November 5.
I’m sure other blog networks will be looking on very closely.
Martin Neumann blogs at The Blog Columnist and at Kickstart My Biz
