Redwood Shores, CA (PRWEB) July 12, 2012
blekko today unveiled the all new ROCKZi, a social environment that delivers the power of curation to the everyday internet user. ROCKZi brings communities of likeminded people together to discuss and comment on timely and relevant news.
The new curated social platform features news boards with popular topic categories like sports, politics, fashion, tech, recipes and more. Users simply click on one of the news boards to view timely, quality content from top sources on the Web in an easily digestible format. In addition, on the news boards ROCKZi users vote stories up, share articles and comments with friends and, in the process, collect their own favorite content. ROCKZi users can contribute relevant content from any place on the Web through an easy to use browser bookmark.
ROCKZis great content, its state of the art design, and its very intuitive, low touch set of tools, creates a social platform that brings curation to the masses, said Rich Skrenta, CEO of blekko. Everyone reading content from anywhere in the web can now also be curating it.
The site is launching today with an initial 33 news boards and plans to expand to several hundred in the next few weeks and thousands by the end of the year. ROCKZi users will eventually have the ability to create their own custom news boards which they can share with their Facebook network and the ROCKZi community.
ROCKZi is blekkos initial effort at taking a different tack on the social and search divide. Rather than the traditional approach of adding more social features to the search interface, ROCKZi creates an independent, low-touch social environment that utilizes search assets and allows users to engage in the content they care about most.
As the number of news boards expands and we introduce more customizable Boards, this has the very powerful potential to revolutionize the way we discover good content on the increasingly cluttered Web, added Skrenta.
Social signals generated by the ROCKZi user base will eventually translate into search signals that blekko can use to identify the highest quality content and curate search results while pushing spam to the bottom.
The introduction of ROCKZi comes as blekkos audience continues to grow. Blekko was founded in 2007 to seek innovations that would eventually eliminate spam from search. In 2010 the company introduced its search engine and unveiled slashtag technology that essentially allowed experts to create vertical search so that results were curated to focus on the best sources on the Web. Users created 100,000 plus slashtags on topics as diverse as college football to gluten free. In May 2012, blekko recorded 5.5 million unique visitors who made more than 110 million searches.
For more information, visit: http://www.rockzi.com
About blekko
Founded in 2007, blekko has pursued technology innovations that would eliminate spam in search results. The company’s investors and strategic partners are Yandex, MLC Private Equity, U.S. Venture Partners, CMEA Capital, PivotNorth Capital, and leading angel investors including Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Jeff Clavier, and Marc Andreessen. blekko has 44 employees, including former Google and Yahoo! Search engineers.