Greg Narain has been laboring with a group of collaborators at Pokkari for the past months on a new project, and yesterday unveiled at least part of what has been brewing:

[from SocialTwister.com: Announcing Relevanta: Reputation for the Blogosphere

Pokkari, Inc. announces the release of its next-generation blog aggregator, Relevanta. Unlike other aggregation and search services that strive to index the Internet at large, Relevanta focuses on specific conversations. Relevanta collects and correlates these conversations in a clear, concise fashion which promotes better evaluation and collaboration among users.

Blogs and other forms of emergent media are quickly rising in popularity and influence. As more and more individuals elect to create and participate in this new, exciting form of journalism, issues arise when attempting to evaluate new sources of information. Lacking a context to gauge the material and perspective on of the author, interested parties are forced to either accept material as presented or perform exhaustive research to validate the facts.

Relevanta introduces a democratic, community model into the news consumption and distribution process. All members of the Relevanta community have the ability to contribute information, commentary, and valuations of both the authors and their written works. In addition, Relevanta’s underlying database provides automatic linking of keywords and provides members with extended data and background information.

With this new set of data, no longer are articles and other forms of content isolated entities Building and mapping relationships between news sources and the articles themselves are natural features afforded even the casual visitor. "Since the Internet first appeared on the mainstream's radar consumers have been plagued by one burning question: 'Is what I'm reading good and accurate?'. Relevanta helps answer this question using community intelligence." notes Jared Klett, CEO and Co-Founder of Pokkari, Inc.

[from Rumors of Kinja]

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.