Blog aggregator Notey has raised a $1.6 million seed round from individual investors Steve Kirsch (Founder of Infoseek, OneID and CoinTrust), Hugo Barra (VP International, Xiaomi) and Ryan Holmes (CEO and Founder of Hootsuite).
Based in Hong Kong, Notey aims to deliver “a window to the blogosphere” and offers something that’s roughly a cross between Feedly (and its ancestor Google Reader) and Flipboard: curated lists of blog content you can follow across different categories.
Unlike Feedly though the site doesn’t present the content of RSS feeds, nor are you able to add individual blogs not in their system. Instead you select a category of interest, then you’re provided with a Pinterest like summary list of the content available; clicking on that content takes you to an overlay popup where the full blog post is presented from the blog, complete with formatting and ads from the particular blog.
“With over 500,000 topics and over 3 million stories, we’re the most powerful blog search engine and reader and today, we’re excited to share all the best stories in the blogosphere with you. It’s a completely new experience.” Co-Founder Catherine Tan said in a statement.
“What differentiates us from RSS readers and blog directories is that we’re focused on the content. We’ve structured the site based on topics, rather than creating a list of bloggers.”
Smart offering, but what year is this?
There’s one word that can best describe Notey and that’s “slick.” It’s gorgeous to look at and use, and presuming you don’t know what a RSS feed is and you’re looking to discover interesting content from across the blogosphere it’s highly recommended.
But it also begs the question: what year is this?
Blogs and blogging still exist, but as Om Malik noted in January “we just call it something else now.”
How many people in the mainstream public would know the likes of major sites such as Mashable, The Huffington Post or Buzzfeed are actually blogs?
And that perhaps is the only major flaw Notey has: it’s pitching a concept of discovering content in a medium that blended into the mainstream years ago. If it can get around the fact that the concept of blogging as a standalone concept is foreign to many in 2015, it may well turn out to be successful.