Rediff Blogshowcase
It looks like Rediff is trying very hard to become a web 2.0 company. Rediff’s iShare hoardings are all over Mumbai and a couple of days back I received an email Rediff saying “The blogshowcase is now ready and you can showcase your blog to the world…”. Rediff Blogshowcase is a blog discovery tool and I tried the service to see what it can do for Indicast.
Let me begin by saying that the service failed to impress me. The email invite that I received told me that the service is still in beta stage but that’s no excuse to put out a half baked product. One of the biggest things missing on the Blogshowcase website is a blurb about the service. There is no about us page!! The registration for this service is on an invite-only basis for now (try your Rediff ID and see if that works) but you can still browse the website and view blogs by top stories, new stories, top blogs and a few more filtering options.
I would love to tell you a lot more about how the service works but Rediff has given us nothing but a page to submit a blog web address and its RSS feed URL. All that the site mentions is “Got a blog? Share it” but it fails to mention anything about the voting system and how blog posts are promoted to the frontpage. You can assign a category and multiple tags to your blog but not your posts.
The site also lacks emphasis on design. The front page has many design inconsistencies. Even Boycott’s mother could have done a better job. There are multiple fonts types used on a page which makes this service looks like a pet project that nobody was supposed to use.
I am not trying to trash this service but I failed to find a contact us page on the website. I wanted to send Rediff all these observations but instead I have ended up writing it on this blog.
In case you are wondering who I am, you can get an intro here.
