In July, Blekko introduced ROCKZi – a social news site to complement the Blekko search engine and generate social signals. This month, the Blekko team have introduced an embed feature to “un-box” results and feed them directly to site owners.
With a Tagline “read, vote, rock” we are expecting great things from the Blekko news feed, and with Digg being revived recently by Betaworks (as mentioned in our SMX Keynote Conversation post), the social news space is about to get a lot more cluttered but potentially a lot more interesting,
What is ROCKZi?
ROCKZi was created during an internal hackathon and then developed into a full-scale product. ROCKZi is a social news feed where users can read, search, submit, upvote or as the tagline states “Read, Vote, ROCK”,
The Blekko blog states:
All the content is pre-wired into the holy trinity of social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest) – so when you add a ROCKZi board to your site, every share, tweet, and pin will drive links and traffic directly to your site, not rockzi.com
What does ROCKZi Look Like?
The ROCKZi blog has links to many sites that are using the news feed on site so we picked Guitar Shop TV. The interface is very ‘Pinterest-like’
New Embed Functionality & Customisation Tools
Easy to embed and easy to customise, the ROCKZi news feed looks like a welcome addition to website owners who find it difficult to keep up using Pinterest Style boards but for news. The new ’embed’ function provides a powerful platform for website owners to create white label newsfeeds around the best content and best sites on the web.
What does this mean for Search & Social?
We can see why Matt McGee from SearchEngineLand questions why Blekko are entering the social space given that they are getting bigger and stronger in the search space, but given that many search engines have a hand in social and Mark Zuckerberg recently announced that Facebook would be looking at search – it seems that search and social are long term business partners – even if it is just to raise the stock price!
For a full intro watch this video with Robert Scoble and Mark Morrison – chief marketing officer of Blekko:
Check it out for yourself at http://rockzi.com/
