Technorati buys blogging community Blogcritics.org

Blog search website Technorati has acquired online magazine and blogging community site Blogcritics.org.

Bloggers publish their posts on Blogcritics, which acts as a source of news and reviews ‘covering all aspects of contemporary culture and society’, to gain wider exposure, an introduction to the site explains.

According to a press release, Technorati will seek to help bloggers on Blogcritics monetise their content.

“As part of Technorati Media, we’ll be able to grow the community and further improve our platform to attract new audiences. Technorati’s mission to help bloggers and people who read blogs is the ideal complement for us,” said Eric Olsen, founder of Blogcritics, in the release.

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Guardian: Pluck picks up Hearst website deal

Social media firm Pluck will supply technology to Hearst Digital’s uber-web portal Allaboutyou.com

It will provided blogs, discussion tools and media-sharing applications to the new community site for women, which combines content from six Natmag’s UK tiles.

The move is part of an ‘aggressive’ push of the business, says the Guardian.

For Hearst, it’s the second major partnership for its magazine websites after securing the services of Brightcove to supply its digital video hosting.

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EPUK launches community site for photographers’ copyright issues

EPUK, the website for editorial photographers, has launched a new website to focus on copyright issues.

Copyright Action is a community website for photographers with resources aimed at helping them with their intellectual property queries.

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JEEcamp: pitch from Kyle McRae, ex-Scoopt

Entering the afternoon session at JEECamp, delegates have been invited to pitch their ‘journalism enterprise’ ideas to the floor.

Kyle McRae, who left photo agency Scoopt, which he founded, only a week ago, raised the idea of Qotz (working title), a community site, where online articles and content will be submitted and filtered on the basis of ‘pull quotes’.

The pull quote, says McRae, is the bait that draws the reader into an article and by tagging content in this way adds more value to the recommendation.

Content would then be searchable by pull quotes and categorised.

While suggesting the service would share similarities with Digg, McRae said there would be ‘no a-list bias’ e.g. no users would have more authority or privilege over others.

Answering a question on how Qotz would differ from del.ici.ous, he said: “del.ici.ous has limited value because it’s the same people recommending the same sites, without any real justification of why.”

Very much in its infancy, with McRae himself admitting he is 60/40 over whether this is a good idea (no indication of direction given) – but how useful would you find this?

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First screenshots of Times Health Club community site

Times Online will tomorrow launch the Times Health Club, its new community website for people wanting to stay fit, loose weight and eat well. Here’s a screen shot of the new site:

The community aspects will allow members to enter profiles, contribute to forums and send messages to one another. The Health Club will also carry editorial on living well, offer advice and allow members to keep diaries on food, exercise, weight loss and other issues.

The site has been developed with the team behind the Saturday health section Body and Soul, and will contain content from the supplement.

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