MeMeme 2.0
Gabe Rivera: filters based on the editorial approach used for Techmeme/memeorandum don’t work well outside of a few topic domains (like politics and tech), because cross linking is typically too sparse to produce a compelling mix of news.
Luckily, I did not know it can’t be done.
A small tweak to the algorithm (going from one post one vote to one site one vote) produced much better results. Witness:
Planet Intertwingly
- Joel on Software
- evhead: Pageviews are Obsolete
- venus.svg
- YouTube - Broadcast Yourself.
- Sam Ruby: MeMeme
- Ross Mayfield's Weblog: Between Popular and Personal there is Social
- Python isn't just Java without the compile | 2006-08-30 | BitWorking
- reddit.com: what's new online
- ongoing · Spolsky Starts a Language War
- Was Joel's Wasabi a joke? (Update: Nope!) (Loud Thinking)
OPML Top 100
- Google Image Labeler
- Getting outside the frothy bubble Scobleizer - Tech Geek Blogger
- Google Image Labeler
- Wal-Mart and Apple Battle for Turf
- all noise - all the time
- FlickrBlog
- Mac Rumors: Apple Event September 12th? Movie Store? [Updatedx2]
- SanDisk Forced to Remove MP3 Players From IFA:Exclusive - Digital-Lifestyles.info
- Narrowcasting with customized homepages
- AppleInsider | Apple to roll-out iTunes movies and 'one more thing'
Analysis
I will immediately concede that echo chambers like the weblogs that tend to be found in the OPML top 100 produce “better” results. Two of the results from Planet Intertwingly (namely YouTube and Reddit) are clearly incidental.
But more importantly (at least to me): the results don’t overlap. At all. Which means to me that approaches like TechMeme are much better at tracking things that I and others don’t care much about.
I see a number of opportunities. One idea might be to place a “headlines” section at the top of the river of news. Another is to provide an option to sort the news by relevance. Or to provide a “related” link at the bottom of news items, which could even be used to fetch additional items via AJAXy techniques.