Announcing Relevanta: Reputation for the Blogosphere

Today, I am proud to announce the beta release of an exciting new blog aggregator, politics.relevanta.com. To put it in its simplest terms, Relevanta pulls content from blogs across the Internet, then provides the members of our community with the ability to rate the content, the bloggers, and everything in between. Adding to the mix, we also provide an extensive encyclopedia and wiki-like functionality that automatically creates relevant links between information.

For anyone that's following the US Election, the War on Terror, and politics in general, I hope this will be a destination for you to not only get informed but also to speak your mind. We're launching in Beta mode, so any feedback is quite welcome (greg.narain at pokkari dot tv).

Since developers always prefer screenshots to press releases, here's a quick tour. Wall poster here.

Relevanta is Community Driven

	Relevanta Economy Relevanta's unique economy system rewards based on merit. Rating, commenting, and posting all boost your experience (XP). Daily spending limits (CP) prevents spamming and trolling.
	Rate Everything Relevanta allows our members to determine the value of information and its source. From politicians and their organizations to bloggers and their entries, your vote counts.
	Member Standings Relevanta makes community members' behavior known. Understanding someone's position is as simple as reading their posts, comments, and even evaluations.

Relevanta is Research Focused

	Person Encyclopedia Relevanta's immense person encyclopedia maintains records on over 4,500 individuals. Find work history, related articles, and even contact information on anyone.
	Organization Encyclopedia Relevanta's vast organization database tracks more than 3,000 organizations. Learn about the relationships between one organization and another and the people that make it all possible.
	Advanced Search Relevanta's unique search lets you search for the background information you need. Whether searching for a person or organization, results are displayed immediately as you type.

Relevanta is Beyond the Blog

	Auto-Contextualization Relevanta understands the information you provide it and automatically creates connections for you. Dynamic contextual links point to both encyclopedia entries as well as member posts.
	Advanced Sorting Relevanta allows multiple views of its content. Beyond the traditional date view, you can also sort based on popularity (rating) and activity (commentary and more).
	Centralized Comments Relevanta provides a centralized, unbiased location for commentary. Your comments are pushed back to the originating site for completeness.

Here's part of the soon-to-be-released press release:

Pokkari, Inc. announces the release of its next-generation blog aggregator, Relevanta. Unlike other aggregation and search services that strive to index the Internet at large, Relevanta focuses on specific conversations. Relevanta collects and correlates these conversations in a clear, concise fashion which promotes better evaluation and collaboration among users.

Blogs and other forms of emergent media are quickly rising in popularity and influence. As more and more individuals elect to create and participate in this new, exciting form of journalism, issues arise when attempting to evaluate new sources of information. Lacking a context to gauge the material and perspective on of the author, interested parties are forced to either accept material as presented or perform exhaustive research to validate the facts.

Relevanta introduces a democratic, community model into the news consumption and distribution process. All members of the Relevanta community have the ability to contribute information, commentary, and valuations of both the authors and their written works. In addition, Relevanta’s underlying database provides automatic linking of keywords and provides members with extended data and background information.

With this new set of data, no longer are articles and other forms of content isolated entities Building and mapping relationships between news sources and the articles themselves are natural features afforded even the casual visitor. "Since the Internet first appeared on the mainstream's radar consumers have been plagued by one burning question: 'Is what I'm reading good and accurate?'. Relevanta helps answer this question using community intelligence." notes Jared Klett, CEO and Co-Founder of Pokkari, Inc.

To demonstrate the power of Relevanta, the inaugural launch (http://politics.relevanta.com) focuses on the upcoming presidential election. Already, the site aggregates content from more than 50 of the leading conversations occurring, manages a database of 4500+ individuals and 3000+ organizations.

Relevanta is a product of Pokkari, Inc, a New York City based Internet upstart developing technology that establishes communities of interest around the ever-expanding world knowledge and information resources.