Personal Bee, yet another Web 2.0 news site
Personal Bee is yet another Web 2.0 news site where you can tailor your own news portal, or “bee.”
Personal Bee plans to launch publicly within the next thirty days. Right now, you can register to request to tinker with it.
We will not quibble with their initial news judgment (SiliconBeat is first on their home page, at least as of this morning).
To be blunt, though, we think there are too many of these sorts of sites out there, so we remain skeptical until we see more. We’re a bit surprised Personal Bee, which is venture backed, is not slicker than it is, especially since it has decided to talk about it publicly (see VentureWire link below). No slick bee logo. No, uh, buzz.
Anyway, the idea is that it lets you, the editor, organize blogs, newspaper articles and other media on a particular topic. Others can subscribe to your topic feeds, and the “bees” continue to edit the topical offerings.
Sam Jadallah, a venture capitalist at Menlo Park’s Mohr Davidow apparently helped incubate the company over a year ago. It now has six employees, and Mohr Davidow has invested $500,000, according to a piece today by VentureWire (subscription required). According to the story, the company might get another $2.5M if it hits certain milestones. It is based in Berkeley.
We wrote about Boxxet yesterday, which is doing something similar (btw, our readers can sign up for access to Boxxet by clicking on a link at the bottom of that post). There’s a host of other sites trying to rank news on particular topics for you, including Memeorandum, Digg and Tailrank, and then there are bunch of newsreader sites out there too that make their own recommendations on blogs you can read, and which offer up similar blogs to those you are already reading.
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About the Author, Matt Marshall
Matt launched VentureBeat in September of 2006, with the realization that no one else was covering the entrepreneurial and tech innovation scene with the velocity or depth that he was. Prior to founding VentureBeat, he covered venture capital for the San Jose Mercury News from 2001 to 2006. In 2002, Matt was awarded "Journalist of the Year" by the Northern California Society of Professional Journalists. Prior to working at the Merc, he was a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal in Bonn, Germany from 1995 to 1998, and a writer for the Washington Post in 1994. Matt holds a PhD in Government and an MA in German and European Studies from Georgetown University. In addition to VentureBeat, Matt is also the Executive Producer of DEMO, the leading launchpad event for emerging technologies.
