Over a year ago I had a vision for a product that would achieve two results:

1. Help bring blogging to the mainstream
2. Let businesses engage with the conversation

Below I have laid out how we are going to achieving that vision very soon.

Channels

Just before Christmas we started testing a new part of our new platform. The ‘channel‘ system allows us (and soon, everyone else) to create a new website that is a mash-up of other content republished using our own next-gen page designer.

Filtering

This is not just simply ’select some feeds’, but a fully fledged filtering engine. For those interested, it’s a fully bespoke engine written in C++ that can filter millions of articles based upon our own micro-programming language. We have created a simple interface (pictured right) – that allows anyone to create complex rules to filter out content.

The rules that can be applied,

• filter by keyword (also by relevance factor, and also by type e.g. person, place, product)
• filter by category (e.g. technology, business, food)
• filter by feed
• filter by media (video, image, audio)
• filter by license (free or paid for – see below)
• filter by rank (either by our internal rank based upon attention data, Technorati rank or by Feedburner follow count)

The engine allows AND’s OR’s and NOT’s (again for your programmers) but again you can see from the screenshot that we have represented these hopefully in a simple way.

Design

I also wanted from the outset for every user to be able to generate web sites that did not just look like a blog. If you look at our first few test channels you’ll hopefully agree to the diversity of what can be built.

Back in October I gave a quick screencast of the editor in action, and as you can see from the screenshot we have further refined the interface.

What is it for?

We do have some clear goals on what can be achieved using our platform but we also believe when the system is opened up to everyone to create thousands of diverse channels the way it is used and for what purpose will be as diverse as the channels themselves.

The three clear areas in which we believe our platform can be of great value.

• Centralizing – The filtering engine has the great ability to bring in content on a particular subject, so we envisage a lot of channels taking niche topics and aggregating them together to build a larger and more vibrant communities. E.g. bring all the Arsenal football club discussions into one place.
• Collaboration – When I personally started blogging I felt that without the ability to work with a few other bloggers I would not be able to make a big blog. With fav.or.it, you can work with a number of other bloggers to build something greater than the sum of its parts. But more importantly, you can pick and choose from each of your own feeds and all the comments made on fav.or.it still get pushed back to each members personal blog.
• Engagement – For companies the ability to engage with their customers is becoming more and more important. Many companies already pay for the ability to track what people are saying about them online. We now take that one step further and give companies the ability to engage directly with their customers and users. Using our technologies we can deliver bespoke websites out to external websites, giving them the ability to engage themselves or also have their own customers have a mainstream interface to read + comment on topics relevant to that company across millions of blogs.

Licensing

The last part of the puzzle relates to the ownership of the content that we aggregate. We were, as far as we can tell, the first aggregator that took note of the creative commons license that is attached to some feeds (10% or so +growing) – in case of the feed declaring non-commercial use we abided by those terms (by only displaying an excerpt). The long term plan which has taken us longer than we hoped was to build a licensing model around feeds.

FeedBroker

In building this feed licensing platform we also saw an opportunity to separate some of the functionality into a new site which would allow for licensing feeds external to fav.or.it – thus feedbroker was born. Feedbroker lets content owners specify terms under which their content may be used, but most importantly, if they desire they can take payments on a pay-per-post basis.

This works using our filtering system to allow consumers of content to specify what kind of content they want and at what price. Most importantly, they are buying the feed content *after* it has been written, so there is no perception of content being produced to order.

The content consumer can either take the content and re-use it within fav.or.it – or produce a secure feed which can then be used within their own site.

Look out very soon for some more screencasts demonstrating all of these features.

We will also in the following days be posting more detailed writeups on each of these features as this summary does not really cover any particular feature in any detail.