Pals' blog hobby turns into a business

What: Blogarithm

Who: Co-founder Andy MacDonald

Employees: Two, including Philadelphia-based co-founder Max Minkoff

What it does: Tracks blogs or other Web pages for users, and sends a daily e-mail telling users which sites have been updated. The e-mail also contains excerpts from the updates.

How it began: Blogarithm started in 2002 as a hobby for MacDonald and Minkoff, who met when they worked at the Human Interface Technology Laboratory at the University of Washington. MacDonald, now 39, had become a big blog reader and was looking for a way to manage those sites. He reads between 50 and 60 blogs a day.

May we recommend? Blogarithm now has a recommendation system that will suggest sites to users based on what they read. MacDonald spent seven years at Amazon.com as a manager of software engineers, and said he was inspired by Amazon's product recommendation system.

Why not RSS? Blogs and other sites often have an RSS feed, which automatically sends updated content to newsreader programs. Blogarithm avoids RSS in favor of e-mail, a method MacDonald said is more thorough and user friendly.

Blogarithm can track changes in sites that don't have RSS feeds, he said.

"We do as much as we can to hide RSS from people and just try and give them a very clean, simple interface to use," he said. "In Blogarithm you subscribe to the page. You don't have to make that mental leap between the page and RSS."

Big year ahead: Blogarithm is free. It has several thousand users and offers advertising on its pages using tools from Google.

MacDonald and Minkoff are seeking angel funding this year and want to hire developers to beef up site features, including adding advertising to the daily e-mail alerts. It may also offer more frequent alerts for people who want to closely track updates.

Quote: Blogs are "kind of like having a personal editor," MacDonald said. "You can find people who will cull through news sources for you and give an independent picture of the world."

— Kim Peterson