I just came across another detailed post commenting about BlogBridge and our expert guides, and I thought it would be of general interest, and at the same time it gives me a chance to explain some interesting things about BlogBridge and our Expert Guides.
The blog is “Sim’s Learning Collections”, where Ray Sims covers individual and organizational learning and other interesting topics, including some of this about BlogBridge:

“[snip...] … the reader looked so much better than Newzie (history) that for the second time this month I absorbed the disruption of changing my day-to-day feed reader, this time to BlogBridge. [snip...]” (from Hello New Friend Redux (Feedreader)

You should read the post though because Ray has a list of positives and negatives about BlogBridge, and I agree with every one of them.

What I want to talk about here are Ray’s comments about our Expert Topic Guides. To paraphrase from the post:

• The Expert Topic Guides are a good idea, and an “excellent idea for a newbie to a topic to get going with a core selection.
• But, the fact that they are a single person’s opinion means that if you are at that person’s mercy.
• Ray suggest some ways to have more community involvement in defining or changing or rating the expert guides.

All three are fair points. Here’s the scoop:

The idea of using human experts instead of some bot is as follows: The world of blogs is not at all uniform in its coverage, and in fact many many blogs are about a whole bunch of relatively unrelated topics that while they are very good, they aren’t focused enough for a collection like ours.

So our belief is that for now (like the very early days of Yahoo) what is needed are people with some kind of ‘right to an opinion’ to help us find the best content in each topic. So I stick by the view that this is a worthwhile approach.

But this is a fair point: some of our experts update their list much more often than others. Some of them are just more credible experts. And in some topics (e.g. branding) are sliced very thin (”The Future of Branding” and “Branding Strategy”)

It also makes good sense to allow the users of the information to give feedback, for example: Thumbs up/down on a guide or an expert, a way to suggest a new feed for an expert Guide, and even a way to suggest a new, better guide on a topic, or to suggest a new topic to cover. These are all excellent ideas which we will be pursuing.

We are always working hard to recruit new Topic Experts, and so we are constantly expanding. Sometimes we find someone who has real expertise in something related but not identical to one we already have. We tend to bring them into the tent because for now, more is better.

So in summary:

• We believe in having expert guides with human faces curating our lists.
• It is true that we have focused more on bringing new faces into the tent than on refining, improving and assessing the ones we already have.
• We can and will do better in allowing community feedback about both our content and our experts.