Via a post from Brian Solis*, I recently came across the site Gooruze (he's one of the founders, apparently). At first, I thought that this was simply a MyRagan clone with a few Silicon Valley flourishes thrown in. I've since come to realize that where MyRagan emphasizes their own content and writers while creating a walled-in social network, Gooruze respects the knowledge of their users. The whole idea behind Gooruze is that it is a place for experts to share their knowledge.
The Gooruze founders seem to have realized that in the world of Facebook, any social networking capability that they can offer would be of little or no value to their members. However, that is not important when you realize that the true value of a site like this the concentration of experts and professionals willing to share their work and thoughts.
This space is becoming increasingly crowded, and I'm interested in seeing which one of these sites will rise to the top.
I feel that although the target audiences for the two are a bit different, I can already tell that I'll be keeping tabs on Gooruze. My only problem with it is the frustration of being a member of yet another site and having to remember to login and check somewhere else.
Aggregation Aggravation? You bet.
-Parker
*I'm not sure what blogging software Brian's blog is built on (though I think that it is Blogger) but its really hard to grab a link for one of his posts while viewing the site as a whole. What is wrong with simply making the title of the post a link that will take you to that post and nothing more? Wordpress does this just fine.