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.

Regator Gives Readers A Better Way To Find Stories, Developers More Control Over Their Content is a post from: The Inquisitr

Social media discovery service (and RSS reader of sorts) Regator has launched an official iPhone application, delivering Regator recommended reads on the go.

The Regator iPhone app includes the ability to browse posts from over 500 topics, search Regator’s extensive archive of blog posts, and the a ability to view the most popular blog posts across the blogsphere by topic at any given point in time.

The app serves as a trends tracker, offering the latest trending topics based on real time, or near real time data being processed by Regator. Other features include the ability to share posts via email, Facebook, or Twitter, and a related posts features that highlights content on other sites on the topic you are looking at.

On a positive note (and one of the reasons we’ve always loved Regator) content featured on Regator links out to the source site, so you click thru to read the post where it was published, and everyone wins.

The price you can’t beat, because it comes in at the magic number of $0. Well worth the download if you want to keep up to date with the latest and most interesting content across the blogosphere. You can download the app on iTunes here.

Regator’s iPhone app is all sorts of win is a post from: The Inquisitr

The new, cleaner look includes a simplified design, thumbnails accompanying posts that feature images, a prominent search bar for posts and blogs and improvements in rich media handling.

Search on the site have been revamped to increase search accuracy and speed, and the site has added more hand picked blogs over 500 categories.

We first wrote about Regator back in July when I noted that it’s a smart service with a lot of potential. The new look is a definite improvement, and more visually appealing. The service tweaks also add to the strong core base product. If you haven’t visited Regator before (or lately), take a look.

Regator gets a makeover is a post from: The Inquisitr

Regator Launches

The excellent directory 2.0/ emerging RSS Reader Regator has launched. See our previous coverage here and here.

Scott Lockhart writes:

We’ll be adding new social media integration, depending on demand over the next few weeks, and are also working on a mobile version, an iPhone app and a variety of widgets. At the end of the day we are looking to keep the site easy to use for mainstream users as well as more geeky types and that means not bloating it with features just for the sake of features. Sometimes easier said than done, but we’re going to give our best shot.

Heekya

David Adewumi writes:

Heekya is changing the way consumers create, share, and discover stories. Heekya allows consumers to easily integrate images, video, sounds, and words to create interactive stories that can be shared with family, friends, and the world. Heekya is Wikipedia for digital media stories.

We built Heekya to allow users to collect disparate media from their personal archive or from across the web, create an interactive story that reflects the breadth and expansiveness of real world narratives, provide location and time-based context to that story, discover interesting stories happening around them, and connect the world’s stories together on both a micro and macro level.

Things we missed: Regator, Heekya is a post from: The Inquisitr

The challenge for the Regator team was to offer an RSS reading service without compromising the site as a destination for high-quality, hand-selected blog content. The compromise: Regator users can now upload OPML files and add individual blogs to view on their personalized My Regator page, along with their favorite Regator blogs. However, blogs uploaded will only be visible to the user who added them, and not shared across Regator, well at least not automatically. Each blog added is automatically nominated for inclusion in Regator’s main database, but are added and categorized for all users to see only if Regator’s editors determine that they have frequently updated, relevant, original, well-written content.

Also new to Regator is the ability to share posts via Facebook, Twitter, and email, with sharing on other sites to be added on demand. Regator is also looking to offer users a unique URL where they can share posts with friends in the near future.

It’s an interesting compromise, and one that in practice works well. Single focused services have a difficult time becoming sticky at a time of hyper-competition in the space. By becoming both a recommendations service and RSS Reader, Regator becomes more appealing as a destination people will regularly want to use.

The service is set to launch August 6, but if you want in now, we have 50 invites for Inquisitr readers. Visit Regator and enter the code inquisitr to give Regator a shot. Our previous Regator coverage here.

Regator now supports OPML, personal feeds + extra invites is a post from: The Inquisitr

Once upon a time in the land of the blogs, the blogroll reigned suprmeme. Everyone had a blogroll, and it was a great way to discover new and interesting blogs. But somewhere along the way blogrolls fell out of favor, and you don’t seem them much at all today.

I’m just as guilty here at The Inquisitr. The template doesn’t really allow for a old fashioned blogroll, and I’ve not tried to create one. And yet I miss the comradeship a blogroll use to offer, a way of sharing links to sites and people you liked or were friends with, and if you were lucky, you’d get a link back.

Google is at least partly to blame. The hysteria surrounding link=nofollow and blogs being punished for paid links made many would-be blogroll owners particularly shy of blogrolls.

Unlike other areas of blogging, where today we see great new services (such as in the commenting space) nothing has seemingly popped up to replace blogrolls. Outbrain offers contextual links across sites, which is a handy feature, but it’s not a blogroll replacement. Something like Regator, but offered white-label could be another possible alternative. Inquisitir iQ wasn’t created as a blogroll alternative, but it’s the closest way I’ve got today to sharing links to content and people I like (and I’ll be adding some new pages next week).

So what happened to the blogroll? Is there any alternatives you’re aware of? Or am I being overly sentimental? Leave a comment below or reply via video in the Seesmic embed with your thoughts.

What ever happened to blogrolls? is a post from: The Inquisitr

Visit Regator here and enter the code “inquisitr” to sign up. First 100 get in.

Our full review of the site here. The other question I had was about the nationality of the site. Founder Scott Lockhart is a Sydney boy who relocated to the Unites States six years ago, so although it’s not really an Australian startup, I’ll claim it half one anyway

100 Regator Invites for Inquisitr Readers is a post from: The Inquisitr