50 Million views of reality - how to find the one that fits you

Dave Winer says there is a river of news...make that an ocean, of 50 million blogs and news sources publishing content every day. How do you find what interests you from new sources you may not know about? Shelley Powers is tired of the traditional tools like Techmeme and Digg, and wants to "give voice to the eloquent but unheard".

TechMeme, TailRank, Findory, Megite, and others use a Google like link ranking algorithm to decide which blogs get listed. Loren Baker at SearchEngineJournal explains "Basically what Gabe is pointing at here is the more blogs which cover and quote your story, the more importance it will receive on Techmeme. So, if you have breaking news on your blog, and dozens of other blogs cover your post, chances are that your blog will receive credit for the story based upon citations and times of posting."

There are no perfect solutions that combine serendipity, editorial intelligence, and popularity filtering all in one.

Comments and Trackbacks from individual blogs provide some serendipity, but are constrained by that particular blog's sphere of influence and readers.

Google, TechMeme, and others use links as one measure of authority and popularity, and on balance I think they do a pretty good job of exposing blogs that cover popular, timely stories.

Editorial intelligence is tough to scale, is in the eyes of the beholder, and rarely right for everyone. Digg and Reddit try to do this with voting schemes. But, a few active people dominate the submissions, and they gang up to get their favorite stuff voted to the top of the list. Sad but true.

Perhaps someone will develop an algorithm that uses all three measures to create the perfect reading list. This is exactly what magazine and news editors do... decide what will be interesting to their audience and filter out all the junk.

All the existing approaches have flaws. Pick the one that suits you best. I like TechMeme.

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Comments

[Greg Linden]

Hey, Don. Findory got left out of this one and, reading over what you are looking for here, I am not sure why.

So, briefly, the way Findory works is that it uses people with similar interests in the community to select and prioritize articles. Oversimplifying a bit, it is a little like a list of what is most popular for people like you.

That at least combines serendipty and popularity filtering, and adds the advantages of being more relevant and much harder to spam.

[Don Dodge]

Greg, Thanks for the explanation of how Findory works. It does combine the best of several approaches.

BTW, I did mention Findory in the second paragraph of this post, and in the title of my previous post, as one of the popular tools for finding interesting blogs.

I should also point readers to my interview with you back in February
http://dondodge.typepad.com/the_next_big_thing/2006/02/findory_persona.html

Thanks for reading. I also enjoy reading your blog "Geeking with Greg".

Don

[Gabe]

I think people tend to forget how effective a single good human editor is in offering lots of interesting links, and even giving voice to the eloquent but unheard. Part of what makes Techmeme so essential in some spheres is the lack of an Instapundit-type player in those spheres.

I think a few good link bloggers would go a long way.

[Ale]

Don,
Did you check this CNN video?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buKaqRG2SFA

[Kevin Burton]

I don't think anything is perfect just yet but we have some really amazing stuff in 2007 which I think will do the trick. Or at least get us a lot closer...

One thing to note. There aren't 50M blogs. I think there are about 4-5M english blogs and certainly a lot fewer blogs per blogosphere per language.

If no one reads a blog should we really count it?