#comments

Neat! So, I saw yesterday all the news that Kindle blog publishing was open to everyone now, so I busted my butt over to the site and signed up. So, wow, that’s freaking cool. Now I’ve set up a few things on the Kindle, a few magazines and my blog. Woo hoo! If you love me, why don’t you go and rate up my blog and leave some awesome reviews about how much it has changed the very fabric of your life? Come on, I’ll give you a cookie if you do!

The process was quick and painless, although weird that they don’t let you use the same password as your regular amazon account even though you can use the same email address. Shrug. Just another something to remember. The approval was super quick, I registered last night and got an email shortly thereafter, so that’s pretty sweet.

When I went to go and look at the entry on the Kindle Blog section, I realized the problem. It’s the general problem with blog discovery anywhere, but it seems sort of exacerbated on the Kindle site. I suppose, it’s more for when you know what blog you want and searching for that specific blog and subscribing to it (do people really subscribe to blogs, like for money?).

But they have a pretty weak taxonomy for finding them – basically you can associate your blog with up to three very broad categories (all of blogdom is divided into 10 categories). That largely makes them useless since the sheer number of blogs is going to overwhelm any particular category. It’d have been nicer if they’d built a slightly deeper taxnomy of more specific, nested categories 2 or maybe even 3 levels deep for people to browse through. Looking at all the various blog directory sites you can see how people have tried to tackle this problem with greater or lesser success – but I think doing something like that would have made for a richer browsing experience to discover these blogs.

They also allow for some number of keywords, this should help with searching and what not – which I assume is their expected way of people finding the different blogs. Search is good, no argument, but I’d really have preferred a more reasonable browse interface – which is in fact the one they promote on the Kindle blog’s front page – where they list 6 of their favorite categories. No where do they more heavily promote a search interface or even a keyword interface with a tag cloud.

Anyway, I think it’s interesting that they’ve opened blog publishing up to the masses and I think it’s even more interesting that people may actually be buying this content in any quantity. I’m just disappointed in the way they’re surfacing (or really not surfacing) what is almost instantly going to be a long tail play. What do you think? Have you already submitted your blog? Have you already rated mine with the 5 stars you know it deserves??