I have caught a few hints about Kinja -- a new approach to blog readership/aggregation/search -- but the website is locked down. Best clues are at www.megnut.com, the blog of Meg Hourihan, one of the founders of Pyra (Blogger).

"I am now the co-founder and president of Kinja (aka the Lafayette Project). Kinja will use the editorial selections and commentary of weblogs to provide a new type of personalized news service. We hope to create a compelling, relevant, and simple weblog reading experience. Here are some answers to frequently asked questions about what we're up to."

"It’s Hard to Read Blogs, but Easy to Write Them

Existing blog technology – as typified by Blogger, Scribble, Greymatter, Big Blog Tool, Movable Type, and Radio Userland, for example – is geared toward the creation and editing of blog content. They are designed to support the activities of the authors, and actually only accomplish that at a primitive level. Surprisingly, many of the features that blog writers would like – reader comments and ratings, polls and other interactive capabilities, notification -- are currently incompletely implemented or provided by third parties.

However, while better blog authoring tools is desirable, it is unclear how any collection of features that are solely geared to improving the lot of writers will lead to a real business model. There are too many low-cost or no-cost competitors. Writers will need some real incentives to shift from whatever they have grown comfortable with.

On the other hand, reading blogs is a pain. I don’t mean the activity of reading a single blog, once you know about it. That’s easy enough. It’s just a web page, with various controls provided.

No – the hard part is being a consistent reader of many blogs. Readers have to keep tabs on each of the blogs they like using different techniques – some manual, some email based. Even more difficult is trying to find high-quality content pertinent to some interest. Blogdex and other indexing systems provide a start in this regard, but I dare you to wade into the world of blogs and try to find quality content about “Travel Writing” or “Microsoft XP” unless you already have a thread or a pointer. And even if a reader has determined a selection of the world’s thousands of blogs that are of interest, there is no good way to create a “DailyMe” – a compilation of recent information from a variety of designated blogs – accessible to a reader or a group of readers.

Support for RSS -- Rich Site Summary (RSS) – in various blogger services is a starting point for ‘push’ style of content distribution.

But what is needed is a pull model – where readers’ activities pull information from various blogs, not a mechanism for publishers to pull content. It’s the subscribe side of the equation – the reader’s side – that needs support.

The premise behind Blogisphere is that the missing insight for creating a working business model around blogs is to focus on what the readers need, and build a system to support readers: to make reading blogs easier and more rewarding.

This model would be based on the now well-established principles of collaborative filtering and slashdot style reader-based evaluation of content quality. And like Slashdot, the goal is to foster communities of readers, united through shared technology. Today, we find that this is emerging in an unconsolidated and haphazard way. Providing a better reader experience – one that will integrate with existing authoring systems, but provide a uniform and consistent reader participation model – will provide a strong incentive for readers to use the system. And later on, the authors will follow."