A small Austin, TX-based company called Pluck is launching a new blog aggregation service called BlogBurst that will filter postings from hundreds of approved bloggers and syndicate their content to major news services (and eventually smaller niche publications as well). Tomorrow, BlogBurst lets rip its fire hose of content at a handful of major newspapers including USA Today publisher Gannett Co., The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, and local pubs The Austin American-Statesman and San Antonio Express. Some are calling this a further blurring of the boundary between mainstream and independent medias. Seems to me more like an expansion of the umbrella of the former and a buttressing of the oft-lamented “power law” with regard to the latter (how the most popular blogs get entrenched in an “A-list” in spite of popular belief a level playing field). The AP has more.
Any blogger can sign up with BlogBurst but some editorial body there decides which blogs go into the syndication feed. Presumably, if the thing takes off, they’ll start breaking it up into multiple feeds — some generalized, some specialized. Participating publishers are povided with “editorial management tools” called the “publisher workbench.” So if I’m a newspaper, I receive a daily dump of thousands of blog postings, broken down into different topic areas. I fiddle around with those in the workbench, choose the ones I want, and then plug them into various slots in my paper. Technically, it works like this (warning, acroynum blitz):

Content from the BlogBurst network is easily integrated into your site via simple JavaScript calls or robust SOAP or XML APIs.

Incidentally, the name blogburst is a bit of co-opted net jargon describing any coordinated effort by bloggers to flood the web with postings on a particular topic — usually some hot-button issue like the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons. Search “blogburst” today on Technorati and you’ll find a slew of right wing bloggers on a “guard the borders” rhetorical rampage (ha! idealistic me, I initially thought they meant the borders between mainstream and grassroots media!).
Meanwhile, as I write, thousands march down Broadway in New York — blogging, as it were, with their feet — in support of America’s illegal immigrants.
I wonder how the two-capital-Bs BlogBurst will deal with the political polarization of blogs.