Buzzfeed launches
Jonah Peretti, late of Eyebeam and currently of Huffington Post, and his fine team have launched Buzzfeed. From the about page:
BuzzFeed distinguishes what is actually interesting from what is merely hyped. We only feature movies, music, fashion, ideas, technology, and culture that are on the rise and worth your time.
The content territory that Buzzfeed aims to fill is an interesting one. The site is not Digg with 125 new items to read on the front page every day. Neither is it an historical record of what people thought was interesting at a certain point in time. It's more like a water cooler conversation with velocity, a moving snapshot of what the media and blogosphere is talking about. As a result, the stuff you see on Buzzfeed is not the absolute newest, freshest thing...there's no truly breaking news on the site because to have buzz around something, people already need to be talking about it somewhere. But unless you're completely obsessive about keeping up with everything going on in all corners of the world, it's likely that Buzzfeed will show you something new and interesting every day, especially if it's in an area you don't normally pay attention to. That's the goal, anyway.
I think it's a great approach, an attempt to cut through a bit of the hype and look past the memes you might chuckle at and then completely forget about and instead, as the about page says, "aggregate authentic excitement that captures what real people are saying about the things they find most interesting". The Borat trend is an example of something that really works with this approach. Unlike most films released these days, there's a surprising number of different things around Borat to talk about. There's the movie itself. There's the surprise popularity of it. And the almost universal great reviews. Then came the lawsuits. Now there's a bit of a backlash. And there's the Snakes on a Plane angle...Borat is a movie that succeeded through viral marketing where SoaP largely failed. A bit of something for everyone there, even for the hardcare Borat fan.
Warning Disclosure: I am an advisor to Buzzfeed.
