No, that won’t work either

In the quest for the definitive blog ranking system, some optimistic guys (and maybe gals, who knows) have launched today the cleverly-named site blogged.

This is how it works: you submit your blog, with a description and some keywords (which they call tags, which is, you know, more 2.0 and stuff), and their team of editors will eventually review and rate your submission.

This innovative approach to organizing and ranking web-content has only two minor problems:

1. Editors need to be extremely well-versed in the categories they are responsible for. Their opinions and tastes should be in line with those of users.
2. You need an army of editors. A big one.

So maybe they can hire lots and lots of editors. Maybe they already have, who knows. But is their editor hiring process good enough? Judging from my initial explorations, the answer is “No!”.

See for yourselves: blogged Programming Blog Directory. Horrifying, isn’t it?

According to blogged, About.com: Web Design / HTML (grade: 9.3) is a better programming blog than Joel on Software (grade: 9.1), and the best programming blog of all is Slashdot (grade: 9.9), Coding Horror coming in a distant second (grade: 9.5).

Anybody that has spent any time at all reading programming blogs (e.g. me) can tell you that neither Slashdot nor About.com: Web Design / HTML are blogs, and neither of them is really about programming.

I guess the blogged guys have never heard about Yahoo! and why/how it lost in search. And I guess they haven’t noticed Technorati’s struggles, either. Sigh. If they would have just read the right blogs…