One-Stop sites for Blogs?

It seems that everybody these days want to control the blogosphere. Gather.com is no exception:

”In the early days of eBay, you could make some beer money selling on the site, and that’s how it will be here at first,” said Gerace, who said his site, which won’t formally launch until February or March, already has hundreds of writers and about 8,500 readers. ”As our audience scales, our authors will see their earnings increase.”

Yes, but shopping for goods is far different than searching for information. EBay just converted the brick and mortar mall into a virtual one. And in those days the search engines weren’t the power houses that they are now.

I could be wrong but when I perused the site I couldn’t find any RSS feeds. Not even by category. Obviously they want us to go their site to generate advertising money. But for me I find it more convenient to just use a newsreader to find what I’m looking for.

Sure, they are promising to share revenue, but doesn’t putting ads on your site accomplish the same thing?

Will they be able to compete with the search engines or the Technoratis? Time will tell. Perhaps I’m missing something here but for now my money is still on Google.

Read for yourself and make your own decision.