Kinja, a project we've been working on for more than a year, has just gone live.

Kinja -- a guide to weblogs -- springs from a simple idea. Weblogs may be the most interesting phenomenon in media in decades, but hold the enthusiasm: they've reached only a tiny minority of the internet audience. About nine in ten US internet users have never even visited a blog.

It's not for a lack of content that weblogs don't yet have a mass audience. For every interest, from baseball to sex, there are thousands of engaging sites. They're just hard to find, and then hard to remember.

If weblogs are to realize their potential, they need to reach beyond the pioneering communities of technologists and amateur political pundits.

So where does Kinja come in? Kinja allows even casual internet users to browse topics, explore the latest weblog writing, and then choose favorite authors to track. A personal Kinja digest contains excerpts from a user's favorites, whether they're friends who blog, or experts on a particular topic. Kinja is a blog of blogs. [More about the site.]

Now, we'd be the first to concede: this is no stunningly new idea. RSS readers, downloadable applications which aggregate syndicated feeds such as NetNewsWire for the Mac, have been around for several years. There are more than a hundred of them. And many offer cool features, such as the ability to view excerpts by author, as well as by time, that aren't included in Kinja. For power users, these RSS readers may still be the best choice.

Because Kinja is an RSS reader for people who don't know what RSS is, who don't know what a reader is, for that matter, or don't care. A Kinja digest looks much like a weblog, with excerpts arranged in reverse chronological order.

We've put ease of use above all else, even at the expense of the tools that power users hanker for. The author of each excerpt is illustrated by a picture icon. Call us news traditionalists if you want, but we believe that excerpts should end cleanly, rather than in the middle of a sentence. Kinja lets users scan excerpts even if the originating weblog isn't set up to syndicate RSS feeds.

Will it take off? Who knows? Kinja will not appeal immediately to the power users, and they're the web's most influential critics. The wider potential audience: that's an article of our faith in weblogs, rather than the product of any research.

But someone -- whether it's Kinja, Bloglines or Yahoo -- should at least test the proposition. Weblog publishing allowed frustrated writers to express themselves. Some of the most prolific weblog writers, have been able to attract a following, but most weblogs remain undiscovered. Kinja will make it that little bit easier for interesting weblog writers, and their potential fans, to connect.