Gather.com Gets 6 Million in Funding

Sarah Perez on January 16th, 2006

6 Million for this? In theory, the idea of a website that will literally "gather" the content of blogs from around the net is a good idea. At least that’s what I thought Gather.com was doing when I signed up after reading a news article about the new business. However, that’s not exactly the case. Bloggers have to submit articles to the site and the content is organized in a directory structure. One would think that a wannabe Web 2.0 company such as this would organize content on-the-fly via tagging, but that is not the case. To make matters worse, the site actually has a business plan to make money through advertising, the revenue of which bloggers will share. This among claims that they’re going to do for content what Ebay did for auctions! Quite a statement! It takes more than a logo with the word "beta" in it and a pretty (though busy-as-Yahoo) homepage to get bloggers on board. Hopefully Gather.com will take this constructive criticism before it’s too late…and Bubble 2.0 begins.