Nick Denton unravels a few mysteries surrouding the other project he is working on, which is expected to go live in the second half of this year:
What is the Lafayette Project? It’s the working title for a weblog media project involving Meg Hourihan and Nick Denton. It’s called Lafayette because that’s the street in Manhattan from which we’re working. It’s a project because it seems pompous to call a self-funded three-person team anything else.
What do you mean by weblog media? Systems such as Blogger and Movable Type have made it easy to publish to the web, but the reader experience leaves much to be desired. The more weblogs there are, the harder it is to keep track of them all. That’s the problem we’re addressing: turning the weblog network into accessible media.
So you’re working on weblog search? No, companies such as Google already provide keyword search over weblog posts. We want to help readers browse weblogs when they *don’t* know what they’re looking for. A best-of-the-blogs show, if you like.
Isn’t that what services such as Technorati and Blogdex already do? Yes, and we’ve learned a lot from the experience of Cameron Marlow at Blogdex and Dave Sifry at Technorati.
We have some similar ideas with BlogStreet. There’s a lot which needs to be done in the world of blogs. Would be good to have some kind of Slashdot-like emergent system. I believe this has to be built around the “people-as-experts” motif.
Denton
