ReadWriteWeb

If an agency has ever pitched you on outreach to women's blogs and they don't mention the BlogHer network, there's something wrong with them. BlogHer and its 2,500 contributing blog affiliates are celebrating the network's 5 year anniversary with the combined traffic of 21 million unique visitors per month and some huge lessons learned along the way. ReadWriteWeb spoke to co-founder Elisa Camahort Page to find out what it's like to run a women's network in a man's world.

Scott Lockhart used to tell his co-workers in the real estate industry that there was a lot of valuable information to be found by reading blogs. They, like all of us, would try blog search engines and end up frustrated with spam, abandoned blogs and low-quality content. So Lockhart quit his job and built an application he thought could solve that problem by unearthing just the most high-quality blog content concerning a wide variety of niche topics. In doing so, he stumbled onto one of the most important issues in the future of the web - the tension between controlled user experience and chaotic freedom.

Yahoo! started out as a hand-curated directory of links and will now recognize the value of manual curation again in a new project to be run by respected online journalist Andrew Golis. That according to Golis himself, who comes from Talking Points Memo - a site widely recognized as one of the best examples of new journalism online.

"The site will be a combination of curation and original reporting," Golis wrote this morning on his personal blog, "with gregarious linking and sharp, smart writing. In other words... I'm going to be building a team to bring the most popular news site in the United States into the news link economy."

Organizing and aggregating content from around the web using frames and bars is a trend we've seen from a lot of social sites in 2009. A similar curation resource now exists for designers, decorators, and architects: DesignBuggy.

Co-founder Ritesh Patel wrote in an email that his cohort and co-founder Chris Kincaid "was a print guy publishing a high end competitor to Architectural Digest. We hit upon the idea that perhaps curated search for one-of-a-kind materials from artisans in the design world would be a good idea." Hence, their site was born.

Shyftr made the news last year about their feed reader service which, while similar to Google Reader, triggered alarms about content theft. Since backing off from that idea, it has been working hard on a new product called the Shyftr Filter that also deals with RSS feeds, but in a completely different way. The new service centers around being able to refine just the content you want from RSS feeds by using a flexible set of search tools.

Announced yesterday (with early coverage from Louis Gray), the initial alpha has a public filter that lets anyone test the technology on a group of a few dozen feeds, and a registration-only Publisher area that allows users to add up to 5 of their own feeds to use with Shyfter Filter.