We have officially launched the trakkrz blogger community and I’d like to congratulate all of those bloggers who made it into our launch and were selected for their high quality.

As we launched we have received some questions about who we are and what we are trying to accomplish. One of the first was Scott Lowe from scottlowe.org – one of the bloggers we’ve selected for our category Virtualization. I took the chance to give Scott a sense of what we are trying to accomplish that I think fits well in an initial description of our service on our blog. So without further ado here’s the body of the email – hope it gives you a good sense of what makes us different from most other blog communities on the web:

Hi Scott –

My marketing manager informed me about ur having questions about trakkrz.com via twitter. Hopefully I can give you a vision of what we’d like trakkrz to be as it grows:

A place where people passionate about a topic can find what is being said by the top bloggers, trakk their posts, comment together and direct people to real people writing real, current articles using their expertise.

Here’s our strategy for doing so:

* Make sure spam doesn’t get into the system – if we only select blogs with true people behind them that really care about their field then spam will never get in – don’t just follow some scraped RSS feed for the topic and post anything that whizzes by – if those bloggers start to spam we’ll simply remove them – we find that almost anything of significant importance on a topic is mentioned fairly quickly by the top bloggers in a topic.
* Highlight the best of what is already good content – give users the ability to “trakk” what they consider to be the best content for each topic – let people see what is the most trakked today, this week and all time – this way people can see the truly exceptional articles at a glance and then go visit them to get the full scoop – this will take time and building the community but we’re committed to doing just that.
* Share revenue – here is a tough one that we’ll continue to refine and improve – because we want people who really care to drive the community, what better place to get them than our currently selected bloggers and what better way to motivate them than sharing any revenues we generate (I know they’re tiny now – but we can only hope ) – therefore as people sign up you’ll see user’s adsense code showing up in our source code – along with our own ads.
* Be transparent – we give followed bloggers access to trakkrz-analytics.com so they can see just how much traffic we’re getting, how many visitors we’re sending their way, what keywords are “popping” and more – it’s built on piwik, the opensource google analytics alternative
* Make it fun with some interesting photos and videos from flickr and youtube – seeing what is popular via other, non-blog media we think gives a little unique flavor to the web and sometimes adds perspective to the written blogged view.

Really I’d try to say that we’re trying to be like the love-child of Digg and Alltop – a commentable place but that has that added filter of editorially selected blogs.

Thanks everyone for your interest in trakkrz.com. We look forward to your participation in what we hope will be a wonderful community to support bloggers who provide great content for the rest of us.

Todd Hogan, Founder – trakkrz.com