I submitted the site of our institute (and this blog) to Blogburst, just to see what happens. Blogburst is a US-American service that takes topical content from ‘pre-approved’ blogs and provides it to publishers for republication. “You get visibility, audience reach and traffic, while publishers weave the rich and diverse fabric of the blogosphere into their sites.” Sounds pretty naive, no? The question here is not only who is in and who is out (the A-list debate) but which blogs are considered doing a ‘correct’ form of blog writing, snappy enough to be integrated in the mainstream media machine. What kind of comments, and stories, are considered acceptable? And what’s the exception? What political, and rethorical, criteria are used to exclude blogs to enter the pool? A similar issue will hit the Global Voices scene as bloggers at this meta-blogging site are going to be integrated in the Reuters news manufacturing procedures.

From: blogburst-editors@pluck.com
Subject: Regarding your BlogBurst request
Date: 17 April 2006 5:06:36 PM
To: geert@xs4all.nl

Thank you for requesting an invitation to BlogBurst. At this time your blog is not a good match for our current set of publisher partners. However, our network of publishers is quickly growing and we encourage you to check back with us occasionally. We expect for many of the blogs not invited in this early period to be a part of the BlogBurst network in the future.

Thank you for your interest in BlogBurst, and best wishes.

Best Regards,
The BlogBurst Team