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The Blog Showcase will feature posts of registered bloggers, which can be voted for by the public
At the Blogcamp held in Pune on Saturday, Rediff.com (one of the lead sponsors of the event) announced the beta of its new initiative, Rediff Blog Showcase. As the name suggests, the website will be a platform for bloggers to showcase their posts. For this, they have to register with Rediff with their RSS (really simple syndication) feeds.
Every time they update their blogs, Rediff Showcase will feature their latest posts which can then be voted Digg-style by readers. They will also be able to comment on the posts on the site, which will also feature the top blog posts, bloggers and blogs of the day. The difference is that whereas on Digg, posts have to be put up manually, at Rediff Showcase they are updated automatically by RSS.
Right now, the website is working on an invitation-only basis, though the url, blogshowcase.rediff.com has been made active where bloggers can put in their requests for an invite.
Jasmeet Singh, vice president, product marketing at Rediff.com adds, “Other blog platforms don’t do anything to promote a blog. They are usually dependent on doing it themselves or waiting for random discovery. Rediff Showcase is not a blog site, but will feature blog posts from different platforms.” Singh adds that the blogs will be checked for updates once a day, and readers will be able to search for posts by keywords, or vist them through tags and pre-determined categories.
Singh added that the website should be live in the next two weeks. With reference to the business model, he said that it would evolve as the community grows.