After reading MacManus’ post on BlogRovr I had to try it. I am a HUGE fan of Techmeme and any service that promises similar information with a personalized slant is something that I cannot wait to try. I signed up, downloaded the Firefox Plugin and exported/imported my feeds into the product. To sum up, BlogRovr is a vertical search engine, personalized from your favorite feeds that sits on top of your browser (FF in my case) and displays relevant posts about the page you are visiting from your feeds. The information is obtained real time and the display is fairly unobtrusive. For example: When I visit Photomatt.net, I get a series of 14 recent articles from my feeds, including tags from those items for links created to Photomatt for various reasons. For now, the plugin is not very processor intensive and MacManus has a detailed post on how it works and how it can be useful. I do not see the economic model yet but Activeweave, the parent company has some VC funding and is already running Stickis (on whose technology BlogRovr is built) so they have something in mind. Right?
Hi Mark,
thanks for trying us out. Processing your feeds to find posts relevant to the page you’re currently on happens on our servers, not in your browser. The extension is only rendering the results. So we’re not anticipating taking over your CPU any time soon. And once you’ve seen these notes on Matt’s blog, you can block them so they are not even brought to you the next time around (all you’ll get is an indication that you have blocked some notes on this page): we aim to help manage the massive amount of information out there by bringing you contextually relevant posts, not make matters worse by forcing stuff on you that you have already grown tired of seeing. Keep sending us feedback!