When I met with Jason and Erin Gurney of Ballhype and Showhype fame earlier this year, I practically sold them on the idea of launching an Apple Macintosh-focused site, which would distill the many Apple related stories from around the Web and provide a centralized site where Mac fans could discuss news, rumors and find a community with other Mac fans. Today, with the launch of MacBlips, they made good on that idea. And as if that weren't enough, in parallel, they launched a site called GadgetBlips, which gathers the top stories from sites like Engadget and Gizmodo, and provides gadget lovers a place to talk up their cell phones, TVs, laptops, or video game consoles, to name a few.
Both sites share a common foundation. MacBlips and GadgetBlips are constantly scouring the blogosphere to find those stories most-frequently referenced in articles, and bringing them to the site's front page, where users can vote them up or down, or make comments, like Digg, and of course, like BallHype and ShowHype.
MacBlips and GadgetBlips users can also submit stories they find from around the Web, and blog owners who write about Mac, Apple and gadgets can register their sites and track activity, to see which of their articles were found the most interesting to the community.Speaking of community, any user can create or participate in subgroups on either site, focused on specific topics, be it iPods, iPhones, Mac Rumors, the BlackBerry or Nintendo Wii, for example. And as with most social networking sites, you can befriend other users, and be alerted when they have activity on the site.
The idea behind MacBlips and GadgetBlips is essentially to provide a single site that finds the very best Mac news and Gadget news, without forcing you to read all the related RSS feeds, and to help you find other Mac-heads and gadget freaks like yourself who like to debate wireless plans, discuss how to switch from Windows to Mac, or just when Apple might release the iPhone Nano.As somebody who in the past has scrolled through screen after screen on MacSurfer.com to find the best articles, or gone one by one from MacWorld to AppleInsider, MacRumors and MacInTouch to be on top of the latest Apple news, the arrival of MacBlips is a welcome sight. But with so many other Mac-related sites out there, it should be interesting to see if the new addition will have folks changing where they choose to engage. And given the Gurneys' efforts on BallHype, which included game picks for sporting events and tournaments around March Madness and the NBA playoffs, for example, I'm very interested to see what kind of predictive behaviors they can do for the next MacWorld Expo Keynote.
You can find MacBlips at http://www.macblips.com/
You can find GadgetBlips at http://www.gadgetblips.com/
On both sites, you can find my ID as "louismg". (MacBlips | GadgetBlips)