Instablogs, sweet idea but not complete to my taste
Instablogs, a blog network with over 100 blogs, over 75 active bloggers and 1 million unique visitors per month, has launched today. The instablogs Community aims to make it easier for new bloggers to build an audience, providing easy blogging tools that turn the site’s commentators into writers.
This site has many features that gives the bloggers things to write about from entertainment to politics and technology. One of the main features is a “reading room”. This is like Digg for blog posts, allowing users to rate entries and comment on them. The second feature is “Newsroom”, allows users to submit leads and news items that others might want to blog about with a simple click “write now” on the side of the site. The other nice features is that you can import your 3rd party blogs into your Instablogs blog space.
This can be compared to Vox, newsvine, or Wordpress.com communities, though Vox and Wordpress do have other features that Instablogs doesn’t have for example : integration with 3rd parties technologies such as amazon, youtube, and flickr.
In my perspective, all social online communities do come with non-complete package. I mean, for god’s sake, why do they have to deliver an incomplete package everytime. While instead of that, they could’ve just copied or imitated the competitor’s technology and then add on top of it to make it better. Why?
This is what I am referring to: Instablogs added those features “Newsroom” and “Reading room” to its community site, but it failed to add the features that Vox has and vice versa. And hey, there is Gabbr community idea now that allows users to submit posts from their own blog and discuss them in a centralized location.
But anyway, the market is still unsaturated and totally unstable. And the market target is always shifting. With instablogs launch, I believe things will probably shift towards “devising” a new model for newspapers. The new model allows readers to comment, vote and re-blog articles on their own personalized pages. And not to mention, with the social feature blogs/articles can be merged together to become as one to complete a whole story or cover both sides of it.
Source: Mashable.com & Instablogs.com
Print This Post
If you enjoyed this post, please consider to leave a comment or subscribe to the feed and get future articles delivered to your feed reader.
Comments
Another thing, though we don’t have integration with flickr, youtube etc. But our developers are fast working on these mashups. So within few weeks, they will be available.
Ankit, thank you for your feedback. But your site is based on a social media type of community, which makes it fall in the same region of Vox. isn’t that right?
But anyway. so since you have not mentioned newsvine, are you implying that newsvine is your competitor?
Thanks
Most of the social media sites work more or less on principles of social networking. Newsvine has a very active community. We have been launched few hours ago, yet we have seen a good growth. But the king of participation Newsvine is enjoying, we would certainly work our ways towards that.
Morad Rayyan is IT professional specialized in New Media development and has special interest in networking "routing" as well as programming.
Thanks for the review, but we are not competing with Vox or Wordpress. We are a news organization based on blogging. We are trying to promote Citizen Journalism by providing some easy tools for our members to participate and discuss the news.
To browse through the news, you don’t need to be a member. Though you need to login before commenting or posting an article.
http://www.vox.com/explore/
http://www.instablogs.com
When you will browse through both these pages, you will find both the platforms are targeting totally different users. In Vox, you will find posts more about friends, family, personal journals etc. While on Instablogs it’s all about news/current events whether it’s Technology, Movies, Social issues, Environment or anything else.