VC Rating: The problem with Boxxet and other topic aggregators

Thank you for taking the effort for looking at Boxxet. As co-founder of Boxxet, I would like to make a few quick points:

* We agree that the passion and opinions of fans need to be taken into account in a good aggregation. We are trying to do exactly that. Our software learns from the actions of the Giants fans in order to find, filter and highlight the best content.

* Specifically to the SF Giants, our system makes a point to highlight bloggers and both of the bloggers you mentioned have been highlighted in our top blogs list (one is there today). The top Giants news and opinions, including many from bloggers, is filtered everyday and highlighted in what I hope is a useful format. We want our Giants fans to discover the great bloggers out there and we know we have given people a broader perspective on their favorite subjects.

* You state that the alternative is to have "passionate authors for each topic is to develop a technology that aggregates topics in a unique way," like Topix or Memeorandum. Both of these are fully automated systems. We hope to be able to build on the ideas of Topix and Memeorandum to produce Boxxets that are even more interesting to the fans. The "passionate author" way would include About.com and the blog networks.

In the end, Boxxet's goal is to aggregate great content from all over the Web, where our systems learn and captures the passion from our users (with a minimal amount of work from them).

Time will tell if we do that right and the challenges are to success are not insignificant. But it would be unfair and incorrect to call Boxxet a "dumb crawl with some human venting". Our innovation is to capture and apply the fans' passion into our algorithms.

wow, there's too much to refute in this write-up. i'll focus on a few things.

- you picked a single portal on zimbio that's our equivalent of a stub (just a shell asking for help). if you want a better example of the promise of our service, you should check out our portals on "film noir", "adventure racing", "pandora internet radio", "rap music", "senator barack obama of illinois", or "dane cook quotes." all of these are still in their infant stages (given we're quite young).

- if you visit our home page or any of these portals, you'll notice that we syndicate and feature content from the personal blogs of our members. we help our members get traffic to their personal blogs, driving both audience and page rank for them, and in return we feature some content for our readers. a blogger doesn't have to decide to which topic each new article should be posted, we can analyze your article and do it for you (member's choice). so all it takes is for one of your passionate buddies to submit his/her blog to zimbio, and the san fran giants portal might become a very different read. you should tell him/her to try it.

- our uniques will be 500K this month, and they've been doubling every couple months. we're proud of what our small team has been able to accomplish on seed funding, before taking on VC and actually marketing our service (which we have not yet done, but will do soon). i'm not sure we're running into the "problems" you mention.

- boxxet, which is different from us in many ways, is not at all a dumb crawl. it has real potential. in any case, if you think there's no innovation in this space, then you should do more homework.

- danny
founder, zimbio