ReadWriteWeb

Regator, the human-curated blog directory and news aggregator, just relaunched with a vastly improved and easier to use design, an improved search engine, and tight integration with Facebook Connect and Delicious. Regator's mission is to aggregate the best content from blogs across over 500 categories. To do so, Regator's editors created a vast directory of the best blogs on the Internet, with topics ranging from tech news and politics to tourism and beekeeping. The service's algorithms then create front pages for every topic that includes the most popular and interesting articles from these blogs, as well as an index of related posts and lists of trending topics.

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.

Regator, the popular blog directory and feed reader, just launched its iPhone application (iTunes link). The app, which is available for free, allows users to browse stories from over 500 topics, ranging from travel blogs to pop culture and sports blogs - with a bit of beekeeping and local news from around the world thrown in for good measure. Every one of these topics is curated by Regator's staff, which ensures that only high-quality blog feeds make it into the app. Every topic also comes with its own memetracker-like 'popular' view and a list of currently trending terms within each category.