Regator Gives Readers A Better Way To Find Stories, Developers More Control Over Their Content


I had the pleasure of meeting Scott Lockhart, co-founder of blog aggregation service Regator at this years BlogWorld and Media Summit in Las Vegas and I must admit, I was very impressed with his companies service, both for readers trying to find the newest and best content in the blogosphere and for developers looking to take advantage of the newest and best trending topics in a variety of subjects.

The Regator website gives a nice simple overview of their service for readers:

Regator is a tool that helps you easily find, read, and share high-quality blog posts about things that interest you. It is available on the web at regator.com and via Regator for iPhone and Regator Premium for iPhone.

Unlike many aggregation services that offer blog posts on a continual basis through algorithms that pull every post under the sun or just pulls from a few sources, Regator actually uses editors to go out and find the best stories on the web from more than 500+ topics.

While finding the newest and best stories is an excellent option for casual and power readers, the real power of their service arrives when webmasters/developers use the websites trending tools. For example, if you click on the “Tech” link at the top of their site, to the right side of the page you’ll notice technology trends, which consists of the newest trends in the Tech sector, however if you want to get more specific you can click on the “get more specific” section, for example “Internet” which will then show you articles and trending topics from only that sub-niche, but it doesn’t story there you can then get even more specific, so perhaps you only want to read about “SEO” articles and finding trending topics in that sub-sub category, well now you can! If you’re a writer or developer for a blog about SEO or any other specific niche, Regator gives you the power to control the type of content you view, thereby allowing you to mine data to find trending topics and stories related to your own content.

Here’s a quick look at the output you would receive from mining down to the SEO sub-section of articles, notice the simple layout and the SEO trending data which has been highlighted:

So why is finding this trending data important? The company announced at BlogWorld that they now have a fully functioning API available which allows developers to gather information about topics in various ways. For example, you could find only information relating to Technology over the last 24 hours or you could find out information about specific search topics such as “Katy Perry” which can provide valuable information about various topics.

The API also allows users to create metadata based on their articles. For example, if writing about the BP Oil Spill words that may be generated from your article could include “Oil Spill, Gulf Coast Disaster” and whatever other metadata is trending and relevant for your article. Since Google, Bing and other search engines want your data to include proper trending information to show relevance, the Regator API provides you with the information you need to examine and there are MANY MORE options within the API which developers can take advantage of for their own needs.

Users can also take advantage of the companies “Trends” tab at the top of the page where they can compare various terms to one and another while receive daily and historic data. Look at the output below for Katy Perry (way more info because she’s the hotter half of her relationship) vs. Russell Brand.

The value I find in this type of trending analysis is simple, you can find when a topic typically trends the highest (day of the week, month, time of year) and you can determine which topics you want to write about have the highest probability of being read and picked up my services such as Regator.

I could go on and on about this service. But honestly, how you use Regator depends on how you use the web, as a typical reader you’ll love finding the best editor chosen stories in over 500+ topics and as a developer the possibilities of the companies API are endless and thanks to their amazing Developers Wiki those endless possibilities are easy to develop, even for individuals playing around with API technology for the first time.

If you’re a developer, I would highly recommend reaching out to the Regator team, for trending and data analysis in the blogosphere you’ll be hard pressed to find a more well structured offering.

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