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One-stop site for blogs offered(Boston Globe, The (KRT) Via Thomson Dialog NewsEdge) Jan. 14--A new Boston website aims to bring order to the tens of millions of weblogs proliferating online and provide one-stop shopping for overwhelmed Internet surfers. In the process, it could put some cash in the pockets of Internet scribes pecking away in obscurity. The site, Gather.com, positions itself as a kind of eBay for online writers and their readers -- a gathering spot for musings and discussions on everything from wine and computers to fitness and spirituality. And, with a business model that could shake up the writing profession, executives from Gather Inc. are recruiting bloggers by offering them a share of the company's advertising revenue. Eventually, popular writers will be able to earn a living by posting their work and attracting eyeballs to advertisements, said Gather's founder, 35-year-old technology entrepreneur Tom Gerace. That won't happen right away, though. "In the early days of eBay, you could make some beer money selling on the site, and that's how it will be here at first," said Gerace, who said his site, which won't formally launch until February or March, already has hundreds of writers and about 8,500 readers. "As our audience scales, our authors will see their earnings increase." The company, which started about a year ago but was in stealth mode through last summer, is set to disclose next week a $6 million funding infusion led by Jim Manzi, former chief executive of Lotus Development Corp. in Cambridge, and Allen & Co., the New York investment bank co-run by Bill Bradley, the former U.S. senator. Manzi and Bradley will join the Gather board of directors. Despite the involvement of those heavy-hitters, Gather.com faces a significant challenge in gaining the critical mass necessary for it to emerge as a ubiquitous platform. More than a dozen other websites, among them About, Technorati, Bloglines, Topix, Squidoo, and Digg, are similarly scrambling to find, aggregate, organize, or build communities around the cacophony of voices echoing around the Internet. And those sites, many based in Silicon Valley, are struggling in the shadow of the giant Internet search engines that can also steer people to blogs, though not in a comprehensive fashion. "They're not in a unique space, but that doesn't mean they can't be unique," San Francisco author and entrepreneur John Battelle said of Gather. "Right now the ones to go to are Google and Yahoo. It's going to take a little time, or a social phenomenon, to change that." Gerace said Gather this year will more than double its 23-person workforce, which operates from an office near the Old State House in Boston. He sees Gather less as a mere host for bloggers than as a social networking site, like teenage blogger favorite MySpace.com, but for an older and more sophisticated audience. But the model Gerace most likes to trumpet is eBay, which created a thriving ecosystem for online auctioneering. Before eBay, there were dozens of small websites selling or auctioning off products, but there was no common platform enabling buyers to comparison-shop and sellers to tap a mass market. "We think of Gather as doing for user-driven content what eBay did for user-driven retail," Gerace said. "Today, the problem in the blogosphere is finding what you want." In its test, or "beta," form, Gather features a mix of articles, mostly by hobbyists and amateur writers. A pastry chef from Knoxville, Tenn., shares his recipe for pineapple lime tart. A woman from Fairfield, Iowa, ruminates on her husband's decision to buy a vacant lot across from a cemetery. And a Cincinnati man grouses about "dysfunctional" reporting by the news media in the West Virginia mining tragedy. The pieces are organized by topics -- politics, sports, home and garden, and so on -- and ranked by Gather based on how many readers they attract, how readers assess their quality, and how much online discussion they generate. One of Gather's new voices belongs to its new financial backer Manzi, who posted an article yesterday extolling the merits of the Gather model. "No longer must I accept much of my content from what I have called the Literary Industrial Complex, that group of concentrated media organizations with their small elites and self-reinforcing arbiters delivering my news and information 'top-down,' " Manzi wrote, casting Gather as a democratic alternative to the mainstream press. In the long run, Gather's success will be determined by the volume of readers and advertisers it can draw, said Charlene Li, a Forrester Research analyst in San Francisco, who blogs on technology issues for Forrester and publishes a personal blog on subjects like cooking, traveling, and being a working mother. Li noted that while the About site is also organized around topics, Gather relies more heavily on the writing of ordinary people rather than the "experts" who are featured on About. (About is owned by The New York Times Co., corporate parent of the Boston Globe.) Li said she knew of no other weblog aggregator sharing ad revenue with writers. "Gather is trying to remove the pressure from writers having to maintain their own individual sites," she said. "And it lets you go public as a writer. Most writers have small audiences for their personal blogs." While the compensation formula is still being determined, Gerace said he expects to introduce a two-tier system in March where the most popular writers may receive checks based on their articles' ratings, while hobbyists may be paid in "points," similar to frequent flier miles, that could be redeemed with online retailers. Gerace declined to discuss specific rates for writers. Gather executives have begun meeting with writers and agents to convince them Gather's business model is the wave of the future. "Writers need to make a living," said Boston literary agent Helen Rees, who has spoken with Gather representatives. "And any system where they can be involved and rewarded financially has to be taken seriously." |