Monday, March 16th at 10:00 AM
Presenters:
Marshall Kirkpatrick – ReadWriteWeb
Louis Gray – louisgray.com
Gabe Rivera – Techmeme
Melanie Baker – AideRSS Inc
Micah Baldwin – Lijit Networks Inc
Favorite methods and strategies for finding the best content or the best technology/tools for finding content.
Louis:
Information anywhere you look on the web. You can find info anywhere! Helpful to limit your sources. Google Reader as a starting point to pull in all RSS feeds. Read fast, share fast, decide fast, click fast. Share it, but know where it’s going (out to friendfeed, facebook etc).
Gabe:
Techmeme is driven by automation, showing the most important events/pieces in tech news. Relies much on link (one blog going to another going to another = newsworthy). It looks for situation where many articles are talking about the same thing over short period of time. A few months back an editing process was entered into techmeme, headlines can be tweaked/removed/moved around on the front page.
Melanie:
ReadWriteWeb editor – works on both human and algorithm side. Finding articles and then seeing how people react to it. Who are the influential people and topics, making sure their content moves in. Blogs can be chosen, and run through postrank to find the top content.
Micah:
The starting point is a trusted source. Ligit aggregates trusted sources. It all starts with trust. By hand trust relationships are replicated online. The key to what’s beyond aggregation is tying it back to real life, and finding the key to trust.
Marshall
ReadWriteWeb – finding the weirdest stuff on the web. Delicious, postrank, yahoo pipes, feedburner used to find interesting sources. Look up links (good?) on delicious to see how most people describe certain sources? Find blog/culture sites on delicious, and ran the feeds through filter, then ran them through yahoo pipes to slices them together, then ran them through feedburner. You end up with a feed of just the best culture/weird blogs.
For those looking to be found, you’ll hear – content is king, write, people will find you, you’ll soon be rich and famous. Truth is, if nobody knows who you are, nobody will find you. The space beyond aggregation provides many sites that take popular and run it through some sort of filter adding a human element to bring out the best (not just the most popular). If you go too much to the human, it’s all about personal opinion, but going too much to the computer side, you get generic results. Combining these two gets you a unique cross-section of the best – you get the wisdom of the crowd w/out just getting what is favorite today. Friendfeed is very useful for picking topics, and drilling down to the best of the day.
The next techmeme-like topic could be a business/finance site, brining together stories/topics in that area.
Macblips.com – Stories get votes to raise most popular in news topics (not just tech).
The interlinked communities aren’t only in the tech space (they just may know how to use the system better). There are still quite a few communities for many other topics.
It isn’t easy to build lists of the top bloggers, but many people (check google) have done this. Think on the people level, to find who you can trust.
Are you looking to find interesting people, or are you looking for topics to blog about yourself? Things you find the old fashion way is probably better. Many of the "popular" things out there are popular because they’ve already been found. Look at lolcatz – they track memes. You need to find more voices than just your own – find new blogs you’ve never heard of before. That list should grow every day, and grow over time. This will drive you deeper into many things.
sonofatweet.com – tracks memes on twitter
Twitter search in google greasemonkey script brings twitter results into your google searches.
Drag and drop zones let you drop your search on many search engines (custom or otherwise)
Questions:
- The focus is largely on blogs, and tech content – what about tools that search across other areas (Mahalo etc.) for consumers or mainstream users?
-There are plenty of tools out there every day, but the normal users will come to us and start using our tools instead of going easier and going from bottom up. It’s ultimately what their goal is – they’re looking for News of the day, many of them use the more generic sites (MSN starting page or MyYahoo). - Many times the top list sites (digg etc) start to grow and get worse as the community grows – how do these sites deal with this growth?
-We’re seeing more sites with promote/burry features, and dealing with this growth. - What is this activity called (the whittling down of content/aggregation?
-Intent-based Curation
Secrets:
- http://rssmeme.com
- One group took a look at popular links, then followed them back to when they were first added to del.icio.us, and started a list of the names that showed up repeatedly, then started following the blogs of those people. There were many similar names, and they continually provide good content.