Creating A Better Blogosphere

Local startup aims to make reading blog posts easier for all

Jennifer Dennard

January 29, 2009

W hat happens when you take an Aussie with a background in real estate, a video game designer, and an editor/writer with a love of Australians and put them all together in a little green house? Atlanta startup Regator.com is the result.

There was a time when blogs were considered a form of very new media. Today that phrase almost seems out of date, as the number of blogs hovers somewhere between 60 million and 115 million, depending on your source. Technorati Media claims to "index more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content."

Seems like a lot of content to wade through if you are looking for information on a very specific topic. A close-knit trio of Atlanta-based blog lovers felt the same way, and decided to embark on a mission of converting that overwhelming number to a more manageable, and more importantly, useful, media tool through the recently launched blog aggregator Regator.com.   

AggREGATOR
So what is a blog aggregator? Scott Lockhart, Regator.com co-founder, CEO and Australian native, says it's a "website that ... brings together articles from a number of blogs and puts them all in one spot. Some aggregators show all of the content. We do not - we just show a summary. We are very opinionated on this. We don't feel it's right to just basically steal content. So we bring these blog posts together so people can find posts and content, audio or text, on whatever they are interested in."

Scott came up with the idea for Regator while working as CTO at RE/MAX Greater Atlanta. His need to find a site that compiled his favorite real estate blogs propelled the Regator concept. So he enlisted the help of his wife, Kimberly Turner, and brother-in-law Chris Turner - who happened to be living with the couple at the time - to help him design and launch what has evolved into Regator.com.

Chris designed the site - his first web-programming job, while Scott worked on design and Kimberly managed the content. Roles they still continue in today, though Scott also works as a consultant for Wells Fargo Ventures, and Kimberly is a senior editor and writer at Atlanta Magazine. The site went through nine months of development and about a month of private beta testing, going live in August 2008.

The trio was able to entirely self-fund the operation.  "We built a lot of our own things," Scott explains. "We have run this as lean and efficiently as possible. We try not to spend money willy nilly because it comes out of our own pockets. The most extravagant thing we did in starting up was our launch party with Paste Magazine."

Taking A Bigger Bite
What originally was going to be an real-estate website quickly evolved into something much larger.

"We realized this is bigger than real estate, and can be applied to a number of topics," Lockhart says. Five hundred topics, to be precise, are currently available to browse through on the site.

"There are people who write daily about beekeeping, tractors, baseball card collecting, origami, anything you can think of," Kimberly says. Starting out, "it was the sheer variety of topics that surprised me, because to blog on a subject, someone has to devote a great deal of time to it daily, or at least weekly. That's one of the reasons Regator is important: People don't realize that these great resources on their favorite hobbies or interests are available. We're giving them an easy way to find these passionate bloggers."

Regator receives between 7,000 and 10,000 new posts each day, which are automatically aggregated based on blogs that Kimberly has already handpicked. The new posts are then ranked based on users' votes and how many users read them.

"Fortunately, being highly selective about which blogs I add to the site means that I'm not required to do a lot of cultivation on a day-to-day basis because we feature only blogs that have consistently solid content," she says. "What I do spend a lot of time doing is finding new, high-quality, frequently updated topical blogs to add to the site. The amount of time I spend doing that varies a lot.

"As part of a bootstrapped startup, I have to wear a lot of hats, so while my main priority is finding new content for the site, there are a lot of days when I might have to do PR, customer service or strategic planning," she adds.

All In The Family
And they still share a house. "It actually works really, really well," Scott admits. "We have a good working dynamic."

"Sometimes it's challenging, but looking back, I'm not sure how we would have done it any other way," Kimberly adds. "There's a certain level of comfort in working with family that allows for blunt, honest communication from the start. That goes a long way towards expediting a project like this. Plus, there's a lot of trust there, which is vital when you're partnering with someone to start a company."

The family realized just how useful their concept was when Regator's users nominated the site in the People's Choice Social News category of the 2008 Mashable Open Web Awards. "That was a really great experience," Scott says. "We got through the first round, which got us into a round of 10. And we thought, 'Wow, this is crazy, because we've only been around for five months!'"

Regator ended up knocking out big names like Digg.com and Mixx.com to make it into the top three, eventually placing third. The company has been very pleased with the momentum its participation in the competition has given the site, which has included increased site traffic and a greater following on Twitter.

Growing The Gator
"We're going to start looking for funding fairly soon," Scott explains when asked if the company is looking to grow. "We would like to be getting out and evangelizing this a lot more. We'd like to have more people adding more blogs to the system. We're doing some of this, but we could be doing more with extra resources and money.

"We wanted to really establish a sense of value before we started approaching investors," he adds. "We're looking at the biggest question: How much money do we need to achieve our goals? I don't want to take more than I need because that means giving up more of a stake in what we've built. We want to bring some good people in and create a website that people like, that's useful, and that we can bring some income off of as well.

"This is a second full-time job that I don't get paid for just yet, and that's how we're all looking at it."

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