VC MONEY GOING TO RSS VENTURES

News.com article on Rojo, Bloglines and the growing RSS space.

So many blogs, so little time--and now, so many entrepreneurs hoping to help you sort through them.

As the number of blogs, news services and other syndicated sources of online information balloons, a new crop of start-ups has emerged promising to improve the signal-to-noise ratio. And venture capitalists and veteran Internet investors Marc Andreessen and Ron Conway are right behind one of them.

Rojo, a San Francisco start-up in the blog aggregation business, "is wrapping a communications capability around content consumption," said Andreessen, Web browser pioneer, Rojo investor and Opsware chairman. "And the killer app for the Internet is and always has been communication."

The boomlet in blog aggregation start-ups comes as online content increasingly is pushed to readers using protocols such as RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom, which transmit fresh lists of headlines and content summaries to a browser, a Web site like Rojo or a separately downloaded application.