More than one year passed since BlogTalk, where I gave this speech about Social News Reading.
The idea was not new indeed.
However, nothing much happened in the past 12 monthes along this route: blogs are still growing steadily, new forms of user participation (e.g. twitter and facebook) became mainstream, APIs and standards are emerging both for managing digital identities (like the recent oAuth) and social networks alike (like google's OpenSocial or sixapart's elsewhere I'm)... but people still read feeds essentially in the same way as before. Feed reading is still a lonely experience, like fishing with line and hook; friends and fellow fishermen can point you to places known to host the richest schools, but finding, extracting and processing the good is still up to the individual. Well, I'm interested in exploring the concept of introducing nets, trawls and active cooperation here, moving from sport to commercial fishing, that is.
Recently there's been some effort (namely feedhub ) to algorithmically determine the subjective relevance of memes and conversations across the net... but I can't say I'm happy with it and here's the short version of why:
1. because the algorithm knows my "sources" but it doesn't know me: the reason why I'm interested in a specific topic at a given time will inevitably vary too fast or too randomly for the algorithm to pick up and adapt to.
2. because for the daily dose of mainstream entertainment, I already have Boing Boing and Techmeme, and they do quite well: they contribute to create that common knowledge texture that underlies conversation with my peers: if it's not signal, it's familiar noise.
3. it doesn't know about my social network. I subscribe to a lot of blogs: most of them are friends I like to be able to quickly sync with from time to time, plus they're on average more clever than me and occasionally come up with a brilliant connection; others are trendsetters and pundits that most of the time brag about pop topics (or themselves); others are rebloggers and nanopublishers specializing in some area of research or practice. From time to time, a sparkle bursts here or there, resonating across the network (often under disguised form) creating a chord. That's the kind of signal I'm interested in.
So I think that feedhub, like other human-driven (digg) or algorithmic (techmeme?) efforts before it, is great for picking up the general buzz and feel, even from a very customized perspective as feedhup promise, but they'll fail when it comes to extracting contextualized value (i.e. something useful to a specific goal).
Whoops, it wasn't that "short". Sorry.
Since I already invested enough of Your (and my) time with this post, I'll close it here, but expect some news on the SocialNewsReading front here soon :)--
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