Venture Capital Back Up in the Internet Mix for the Oh-Six

Venture capital, that risky investing that took a turn for the worse when the tech bubble burst with the new millennium, is backing Boston businesses again. Honestly, we’re not surprised. After making our way through a lengthy Boston Globe article on the Boston start-up blog directory, Gather.com, it’s abundantly clear that there is money to be had in the worlds of new technology. Gather has grabbed $6 mil. and they’re still running in Beta. But Bostonist can’t see why they’re better than anyone else.

Yahoo! started the directory craze when the boom was going strong, helping us to find relevant information on the web. Now, myriad sites on the ol' internets work to aggregate information and provide some semblance of organization. With the current proliferation of blogs, we get great things like our local-bred UniversalHub and now Top 10 Sources (with a brand new executive structure), among other worldwide bastions of blog-spotting like Technorati, Digg, and even del.icio.us.

A wide range of service exists within these various examples. Top 10 Sources grabs the RSS feeds from the ten blogs that a category editor deems important, not necessarily the best posts. UniversalHub calls for reader submissions and “community journalism,” but Adam Gaffin carries the heaviest load (quite ably and admirably, we might add), providing multiple daily updates of narratives and links to what he’s read and found interesting on local blogs. Squidoo, like UniversalHub, relies on various writers to provide a lens (their term) through which to view the blogosphere. Technorati, similar to our new best friend Cameron’s blogdex before it, tracks links to find out what is the most important topic on the ‘net. Technorati tracks tags and how many links are made on any given topic to assign value. Digg relies on users to tag articles and posts as important, then reports back the relevant results. Bostonist has long been a fan of del.icio.us because, frankly, it’s de-lovely. Like other sites, it’s part social networking, part reliance on editors whom you trust, and part link list that lets us kill hours at work searching deep into the web with sites that are just plain fun. Why do we read the blogs out there? Because each has its own personality. Reading knuckleheads like us is one thing; following the life and times of celebs and their outrageous outfits is the quite another.

Back to Gather. As far as we can tell, they’re not any different than any of the sites outlined here. The user-submitted content, discussion, and ranking fits the general mold of sites with easier-to-use interfaces and larger communities than Gather. What Gather does have is some savvy business people looking to sink some capital into the project. The reward? Unlike blogging on one's own (or even our fair site), they’re promising pay. Caveat: Cash money will go only to the best, most, and otherwise top posters on their site, while others will get points redeemable at Gather's partner sites. Bostonist gives kudos to the boys aat their dinner party in the South End for grabbing some big bucks to fund their project. We, on the other hand, are still blogging for a couple beers here and there.

Image thanks to holdeverything for showing us how we might organize the Internet in our own home office if we had the venture capital behind us. Yes, the internets will fit in there.