DigitalBeat

Peter Rojas and Ryan Block are among the world’s most recognized bloggers on any topic, not just tech. The website they built together, Engadget, is one of the world’s most-read blogs. Engadget and its crosstown rival site Gizmodo set the bar for fast reporting of gearhead news far, far above the heads of the older, deeper-pocketed publications whose audiences they stole. (Technically, I don’t think Block is a “founder,” but he certainly made the site his own.)

Today the pair are launching a new gadget site, Gdgt, that lets gadget fans rather than hired writers generate the content. The site’s premise is simple: The only thing better than Engadget would be something like Engadget that lets anyone crazy enough contribute.

Rojas and Block each left Engadget separately after a few years of frenetic round-the-clock blogging.  Here’s their one-paragraph description of how Gdgt differs from Engadget. In short, they’re crowdsourcing what used to be done by a small team of young writers:

gdgt isn’t a top-down, editorially-driven news site, it’s a socially oriented web app premised around consumer electronics. We’re all about users and what gadgets they have and want, so rather than just focus on the pre-purchase cycle (i.e. the lust phase), or on user support, our emphasis is on the entire product ownership cycle. We want to create a place where
users can get more out of the products they own for as long as they own them — as well as help them discover that next great device to add to their collection.

The screenshots below show what Rojas and Block believe are the site’s strongest features. To begin with, the home page is more of a community site and less of a news site:

912*600/669

There’s a gadget finder:

Another page does product comparisons:

Individual products get their own homepage:

But the real value of Gdgt will be the news, reviews and obsessively detailed specifications posted by users, rather than Rojas or Block. Having each written thousands of posts in past years, they’re hoping this time to harness the same crazy enthusiasm in their readers to build a site much bigger than any paid staff of bloggers could ever produce.

Next Story: Nickelodeon launches its AddictingGames brand on iPhone
Previous Story: CBS’ Natali Del Conte hosts MobileBeat startup competition: Deadline today!