I’m in the midst of writing up a response to the complex pile of comments which landed on the Remotely article, but in the meantime, here’s some recent landings on my feed list. Starting with the oldest first:
TechMeme appears to comb all tech news and weblog sources and then does some “magic” to assess popularity. I haven’t done any research, but I’m guessing it heavily weights cross-linking as well as comment activity on other sites. That’s irrelevant… what’s cool is that it does capture hot pipin’ relevant bits. If you’re a nerd like me, you want as few stops as possible to capture buzz and Memeorandum does it.
Memorandum suffers from the wall-of-text problems that still make del.icio.us intimidating and a tricky browsing experience, but if you’re simply reaping data from an aggregator, who cares?
TechCrunch’s stated goal is “Tracking Web 2.0” which means I should starting foaming at the mouth regarding Web 2.0 (again). Problem is, Michael Arrington, the site’s writer, is doing a good job of sifting through the noise to find Web 2.0 bits that deserve a second click. I base this entirely on my completely unscientific method of noticing when I leave Bloglines to read a story at the actual site: ValleyWag. There has been a well-defined need for a good valley gossip rag since Infoworld nuked the original Cringely back forever ago. Still, the idea that I care about who the Google founders are nailing is absurd, so, clearly, they’ve got a hit on their hands.
My hope is that the Wag takes a stab on software gossip, as well, because I’ve got serious concerns about the quantity of juicy nerd_celebrity gossip that’s out there.
The thought is a simple one. A majority of the sites sitting in Bloglines represent the voice of a single person. I am wondering out loud why that is the case. Is there any way to articulate what is lost when a site aggregates multiple voices into one other than, “It doesn’t sound real”?
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