Vertical business news

Roger sent me an invite today to Newsvine, which is pretty cool. It’s kind of a mashup between Rojo and Digg. I admit I haven’t played around with it a whole lot, so I may be missing the boat in that brief description.

The real reason for this post, though, was that from Newsvine’s business center, I bumped into Blogburst, and Tailrank (which, despite the name, isn’t a Hot or Not clone). Both sites aim to whittle the content of blogs down to the “best” for your (or your favorite journalist’s) browsing pleasure. If these two sites are any indication, the market for either taste-making or sense-making within the so-called blogosphere is huge and probably growing as fast as the ’sphere itself.

From somewhere nearby, I ran into Jotzel which I’d previously missed seeing. Jotzel was birthed by Rob and Jay and I think it’s on the right track. Here’s a place where both business blog content and general business news content is filtered and commented upon. As it grows, this seems like it’d be a logical first stop for business journalists to check out. Also, as it grows, I could see it sprouting more targeted markets within the business category (operations, HR, finance, etc…). One thing it’s sorely missing right now is an easy way for people to add to the database. I want to use it but I’ll forget unless I’ve got some kind of toolbar button or context menu item that I can use to push stuff over there. The current “add a story” page makes it clear that this isn’t a tag ‘em and bag ‘em site like del.icio.us or digg. But even so, with some javascript magic, the submit a story page could be turned into a pop-up and I’d never have to forget about Jotzel again.