Subscribe51Kaola: BSP for copycats
51Kaola has found some business model based on online digest. I don’t know if it’s suitable to call it BSP. Before I find a better name, let’s think about it as a BSP that encourages copying.
A report from 21 century business herald shows more background. 51Kaola is backed by a startup in Shenzhen, called Brilliant, which was founded in May 2006. It has just received 5 million Yuan from IDG.
Jin Guangzhe, founder of 51Kaola said the idea is from the famous magazine Reader’s Digest. Why would a magazine without original content be successful? Because digest is another way to show your professionalism and knowledge. So 51Kaola wants to be a social media empowered by copycats.
When asked about the monetization of the website, Jin said when they get enough traffic, there will be a way to turn those traffic into money. On their website, there’re ad banners already. In my opinion, they are going the same way as traditional news portal like Sina, mainly based on advertisement.
The service includes two main parts: An IE toolbar and a personal space. Your personal space is organized with a new concept, box. A box is actually a blog. So your space can include unlimited blogs. In this way, you make topic focused boxes and open them to different readers. And there’s a flash self promotion area on your space homepage. You can introduce your featured boxes in this area.
Each box has four sections: your articles (your original posts and digests), your favorite boxes from others, a simple RSS aggregator and system recommended boxes. When you browse web pages, you can save digest with the IE toolbar. Your saved content will come into article section of your box.
The system recommended boxes section in my test space is still empty. This is reasonable, because it hasn’t got enough information of my interests. When you digest more content, and the service gets more users, this will be a good way to discover interesting boxes.
The help section is well written. I can understand their features without installation of the toolbar. Actually I tried to use the toolbar. After first several minutes, I’m impressed. The toolbar not only makes it easy to digest content from web page, but also provides a notable online image editor. You can finish simple image processing without actually downloading the image.
More benefits of installing the toolbar is that you get RSS discovery feature even in IE6. The RSS icon on the toolbar will change if the web page you are browsing is RSS enabled. Since the service encourage you copy everywhere. There’s a Copy To My Blog button under each post in the simple online RSS reader.
There’re more notable designs in this service. If you are bored, point your eyes to the right side of the toolbar or up right corner of your own space, there’s a one-line scrolling article recommendation widget. Although they are trying to be a user powered Sina, their homepage doesn’t make you confused. Every section has a reason to be there.
The website has common web2.0 features. They use tags to link similar content to each other. Your personal space or some of your boxes will be promoted to homepage according to your popularity. While all the other Myspace-wannabe competitors are focusing on persuading users to share more original content, 51Kaola finds a different way. I believe this idea is going to be huge.
Since you have read thus long, there’s a bonus link about the entrepreneur. I found this link when I was searching for back ground of the company. I won’t comment on it since I don’t know the whole story. And this has nothing to do with my review of the service, but readers should be notified.
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[…] China Web2.0 Review » » 51Kaola: BSP for copycats Before I find a better name, let’s think about it as a BSP that encourages copying. (tags: copycat BSP) […]
[…] Another feather that you should notice is Qihoo Juke. This is a bit like 51Kaola that we have introduced before. But sources of Juke are all from Qihoo’s own index database. In this way, Qihoo is using grassroots editors to organize distributed information into aggregated topics. […]
So now comes the question, who is going to be responsible for most of the inappropriate copy-n-pastes? Maybe not a big one, in China…