After publishing my rejection of the personalized meme tracking approach, I thought that the following question might come up: if you want a momblog meme tracker or any other type of vertical, domain-specific meme tracker, why don’t you build it yourself? I’ve thought about building it myself and have put together some of the pieces. But I like playing with and building software as a support to my writing and philosophizing, not as my primary activity. It takes me a long time to construct an essay for my blog that pleases me. I don’t have much if any hacking time left over after that. However, were there a platform that gave me support for building a vertical meme tracker, that allowed me to import seed OPML files and define the HTML/CSS of my page then publish a display of hot topics as identified by rules I specify, that made it as easy as publishing my blog… well, I’d pay for that and I’d publish a Momorandum site that all my momblog buddies and I could check each morning.
The pieces for this exist in different places:
- A blogging/content management system like WordPress pushes content into a consistent format, archives it, and turns it into different feed formats.
- A popular links finder like the one from Hacking RSS and Atom can scan through a list of feeds and find “hot” conversations. Note this is not necessarily the right approach for every domain: you might need to do comment counts or keyword search or use other tactics to find the gold in the dirt. A mom blog post might be very interesting and important to the community but not get any links. It might get a ton of comments though. Or, a post might be notable just because it deals with a certain theme, like how to balance work and family. I’d love to be notified when another mom is making plans to go back to work and then be able to follow her experiences.
- A developer playground like Ning offers support for social interaction on a meme tracker… like if you wanted to add tagging or voting capabilities.
- OPML reading lists can provide an easy way to add and subtract feeds from the “community” of feeds being watched.
Right now, there’s no easy way to build a Memeorandum clone for a particular community. I’m hoping Ning might provide a basic hot topics aggregator that I can clone. I’m not prepared to start from scratch. I also have some hopes for Top Ten Sources, because I like their basic idea though I have doubts about the social structure they’ve chosen for achieving it.
Are there services out there that will do what I want that I don’t know about? Am I missing something? Reading lists are a start on this, but what I’m asking for is more editing and pivoting and summarization capabilities on top of that, so individual superbloggers can publish filtered and aggregated news pages that appeal to entire communities of users.
10 Comments
About the only thing you haven’t mentioned are planets-style aggregators, which, when hooked to category feeds from a self-identifying community, can definitely serve as a starting point for building the kind of thing you’re talking about.
Not that it’s a short step from there to actual meme-tracking, but it should be possible, and an interesting technical challenge.
The truly hard part is getting a diffuse community to self-identify. Tagging services can help (ie. “feeds that have posts that were tagged ‘motherhood’ in the last 30 days” are automatically suggested for inclusion).
Hey this is great! We should talk!
Halley
Michael, I’m not familiar with planets-style aggregators, but sounds intriguing.
You’re right–the hard part is finding the community, and in the case I’m talking about, creating the basis for a community. I have this idea that more conversation could be taking place around parenting issues and that highlighting such conversations would encourage that.
Halley - I’d love to talk to you about my ideas and what Top Ten Sources is doing. There is a huge need for human and computer filtering/editing between the millions of blogs and their potential readers, especially in the so-called long tail. I think momblogs especially are ripe for revolution.
Don’t we have a bunch of these already? < a href="http://www.personalbee.com/">PersonalBee? Megite? etc?
Hey Ryan, yeah, those do the basic hot links finding as far as I know. But what I want goes a bit beyond that. It would include some filtering to get rid of nonparenting articles or “josie used the potty” posts. It might do some screen-scraping to count comments to determine which posts/conversations are hottest because in momblogland people don’t link to each other much. To make a really good Momorandum likely requires custom development.
However, I did work with Matthew Chen on Megite to get a trial parenting page set up. So yeah, those services are good starting points.
Sorry, I mistyped a bit. I meant ‘planet-style’. Here is a link to the main PlanetPlanet site:
http://planetplanet.org/
The two I use semi-regularly are:
http://planetatom.net/
http://www.planetpython.org/
It’s just a web-based aggregator with a preselected set of feeds, but it could serve as a platform for further innovation along the lines you’ve expressed an interest in.
Thanks for the pointers, Michael. Very interesting–I hadn’t heard of the planet-style approach.
Keep pushing this idea….you’re on the right track here I think.
i want a taggregator platform. a platform for aggregating tags and structured blogs.