TH: It seems like BlogMedia has divested itself of many different blogs in pursuit of that focus; where does that leave the BlogHerald?
MC: The Blog Herald is a key part of Problogging, Inc. and the cornerstone of our coverage of the blogosphere.

TH: Can you expand a little on what your focus will be on — from a blogging point of view?
MC: We’ll always be covering the blogosphere in some way, shape, or form. We’ll be talking more about professional blogging over at problogging.com – and launching a new podcast only site in the near future.

TH: You’ve divested yourself of quite a few blogs; will you be looking to acquire any blogs at this point to hone your focus?
MC: While we would never rule out an acquisition of the right site for the right price, we’re not currently seeking to acquire a blog, or any other website for that matter

TH: It sounds like ProBlogging is meant to be a “full service” firm for bloggers, including consulting work. Have you done any consulting work with bloggers, and can you tell us about any successes you may have had?
MC: Our blog network is our resume along with other consulting work that we have done. In our time owning The Blog Herald, we’ve increased traffic by 27% and revenues by 30% – mostly by implementing tactics that we’ve developed. Beyond that, some of our consulting clients include Fortune 500 companies in the United States – we’ve been doing more and more blog work with them over the last two years. But unfortunately, we can’t disclose that client list. Part of getting companies to blog is getting them over the fear that they have to share *everything* about what goes on within their company. They don’t have to be a Scoble, for example.. instead they just need to be authentic representatives of their company, which is easier said that done.

TH: Speaking of Fortune 500 companies, is your focus going to be large corporations? Or smaller businesses? Or, is it really going to include everyone?
MC: We’re going to have a broad focus here – but we believe that there’s a huge opportunity for all businesses – small, medium, and large – to use blogging as a way to help promote their business. Plus, we think that our own experiences with building blogs will make for some good copy and some great lessons to be learned by others – and we’re looking forward to sharing those.

TH: I know its early, but can you give us any hints what we can expect in ProBlogging’s first 100 days?
MC: In the first 100 days? Well, we have some site work to do and some development work to do on the backend – but we’ll be launching some new services and other features to the site sometime in the first 100 days or so. And we hope to have our first eBook out during that time.

TH: Will it be free?
MC: we’ll be publishing some free ones, yes. But some probably won’t be free.

TH: Thanks matt.
MC: No Problem Tony.

And with that, Matt went back to swinging that bloody axe of his. At this count, BlogMedia (err, or is that ProBlogging) has has sold three blogs, and has put a fourth on the chopping block, and unfortunately, I didn’t ask if there were going to be any more (cue in dangerous music).

Tony Hung: I noticed your site some time ago as I started to get listed on Megite, but there’s not a whole lot to find on Megite about what it’s about and who the people behind the scenes are. Can you tell us a little bit about what Megite is, where you guys are located and a little bit about yourself?

Matthew Chen: We have been working on Megite related technology and algorithm for a long time for the other applications. But we’ve found that our algorithm is good at meme tracking, so we started to port our system and algorithm at the beginning of this year. We launched our site in February to test the waters. We’ve gotten lots of feedback, both in terms of suggestions and complaints. So we continue to improve it, and recently we’ve made significant improvements on the algorithm, software and infrastructure.

We want Megite to be an intelligent RSS reader. We create and develop the main verticals, such as technology, politics, business, entertainment, science, etc. And users can create their own Megite by feeding their reading list. The personalization service is costly and we are in the process of securing resources before we can launch it to the public.

We are located in Silicon Valley. Currently we have two people working on this project, both with computer science degree and many years of working experience.

TH: Does this mean you might be searching for external (i.e. VC) funding?
MC: Yes. We are going to approach VC’s for that purpose. If we don’t expand to personal version, we are ok to self funding.

TH: Where did you come up with the name “Megite” — and how do you pronounce it?
MC: This is a funny name originally for our other product.

Me – Mega(byte)
Gi – Giga(byte)
Te – Tera(byte)

me ‘gi te

me as in melissa
gi as in giga
te as t

TH: Can you talk a little bit about the most recent improvements? How will they make the experience better for your users?
MC: Sure.

1. New blog discovery: Introduce the blog auto discovery. So not only the A-list bloggers, B, C bloggers can be the sources to Megite. This improves the coverage and inclusiveness of Megite.

2. Ranking algorithm. Introduce the blog quality importance evaluation algorithm and improve the ranking algorithm by combining the blog importance, content relevance, linkage information, time, user feedback, and more.

3. Clustering algorithm. Better clustering algorithm to put the posts about the same topic under the same thread.

4. Better Thumbnail image extraction

5. Cache thumbnail images on our server.

6. Crawling infrastructure improvement that helps us to update more frequently and handle more verticals.

7. More verticals are covered: Entertainment, Science, Food, Fashion, etc.

8. Better title and description extraction. For example, the first release in Feb and the current version are very different. You can see better titles, better descriptions, better threads (cluster), better image thumbnails, and it’s more relevant. You can uncover the important news and at the same time balance the “new” news.

TH: Now by the blog discovery — is that something where bloggers can submit their own blogs? Or by that do you mean that Megite is simply looking for blog sources automatically?
MC: Mainly Megite is simply looking for blog sources automatically. Either they are mentioned by some good bloggers, or from with good and relevant content. Of course, a blogger can submit his/her blog to us and then they may be feed into our algorithm if it is not a spam blog. A blogger can link to us or news items, and if the algorithm sees lots of references to that blog, it may pick up the blog and feed into the algorithm.

TH: So, what you’re saying is that while most of the time Megite picks up blogs on their own because of link patterns and relevant content, bloggers *can* submit their sites to be included?
MC: Right. For a quality blog, Megite can pick up automatically. For the newly created blogs, a user can submit to us. We will evaluate the quality. Otherwise it has to wait for our algorithm to evaluate in the future.

TH: How do you see Megite different than other news aggregators such as Techmeme or TailRank? (Besides that it doesn’t start with a “t”)
MC: We believe the differences to be in terms of Quality, Coverage, Comprehensiveness, Relevance, and the fact that it’s up to date. We have been working hard to put ourselves ahead.

Techmeme and TailRank came to market before us. But we are in good shape now. We still have lots of room to improve. The first difference is that our powerful algorithm makes it very easy to create new verticals.

Because of the auto discovery, Megite can keep the pace with the blogspace. Normally good high quality blogs can be auto discovered.

Also, Megite is able to deliver the personalized version with the user’s reading list.

TH: Anything we can look forward to in the future?
MC: First a comprehensive news and blog aggregation portal and platform. Megite will cover news and blogs on every aspect of life, tech, politics, science, life, art, music, etc. Second a personalized, customizable news reader that works on user’s reading list. Will be able to recommend relevant blogs in the future. Third, search on the archives