On Topic With Topix.Net, Part 1

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WebProNews editor Mike McDonald spoke with Chris Tolles, Renaissance man and VP Sales and Marketing for Topix.net, to get his thoughts on blogs and news; and, we picked up some hints on a soon-to-be unveiled service from the company.

Topix.net has a lot of news categories. Lots and lots of them. Over 330,000 categories. As Tolles told WebProNews editor Mike McDonald, it "makes us a little different than a typical search engine."

"You are seeing a blurring of 'what is news',"; Tolles said of blogs.

Topix hasn't ignored the importance of blogs, which Tolles noted augment news well. Viewing a category on Topix shows a mix of stories from news sites and blogs. Topix differentiates them visually by giving blog results a colored background against the white page.

The site has been including blogs for a while. Tolles said they started by looking at a million blogs, and culled that number down to about 15,000. Searching Topix now means users are doing blog search as well as news search. "I'm actually using our blog search more than I'm using other blog searches because we have a much better index," Tolles said.

"The experiment has succeeded; now what do we do with it?"

To Tolles, and to Topix, blogs are what people want. "We will have a new page in about a week, which will give you 'what is the blogosphere saying,' that is only the top news in blogs," Tolles said. Also, one planned update will give users the ability to search only blogs, or only news sites.

Tolles cited how Topix wants to harvest the wisdom of crowds from those 15,000 blogs that made it through their screening process. He acknowledged the need for checks and balances on an ongoing basis, and said, "another thing you're going to see from us is a lot more human interaction on top of what we're doing."

He called that an "architecture of participation." In building a foundation, there are a couple of considerations that have to be addressed to make it work.

"Any system that would be built has two problems: first, getting enough people to matter, and then making sure that it isn't hijacked by spammers."

Without the threat of spammers, implementation would be a lot simpler. However, Topix has to find the right balance to their architecture of participation. "If you make it too hard to play, no one talks. Make it too easy to play, it turns into something that is bad," said Tolles.

"We clearly see that people want to see what everybody's saying about their stuff, in the particular subject that they care about," Tolles claimed. How will Topix.net address this? Tomorrow we'll post part two of the WebProNews interview with Chris Tolles of Topix.net.

And next Monday we’ll tell you…well, you’ll have to wait until then.