Library clips

Along the lines of DiggLicious and Diggdot.us, Techzingo is a tag cloud generated from memeorandum, slashdot, digg, and the register.

Clicking on a tag will show you stories with that tag…these services don’t seem to have tags, so each tag must just be a search term…also you can subscribe to an RSS feed for each tag.

SuprGlu enables you to splice feeds and view the content from all these feeds by tag, but I don’t think it will do it by search term…although you could do something along these lines with TagCloud or PersonalBee…but each tag doesn’t have an RSS feed.

I wonder how the tags (search terms) come about at Techzingo.

A while back I posted on FeedMail, which is a system where people can send each other messages from a form page and receive these messages via RSS.

The problem is that for each contact you need a personal receiving RSS feed…this is like having multiple email addresses to receive an email from each contact….read more.

Via a great post from Rok, is the new FeedMail Now…anyone can send an email to your RSS address, that you can read in your RSS reader.

Messages are also sent as an RSS feed via a form page…read more…see a step by step PDF.

So this seems to do what email does, only with RSS…so you can receive an email in an RSS reader, and send it via the mail client.

When you send a feed it’s similar to publishing a blog post (HTML version), the feed of your blog will have a feed version of your post…you the read this in an RSS reader.

Except with FeedMail Now there is only a feed version, there isn’t a HTML version…all you have is raw xml where it can be rendered and read in an RSS reader.

Could SSE come into the equation?

Steve Rubel seems to be looking at the quantity and speed of incoming links to a meme…but can’t you already find this out with Technorati link searches.

The idea of memetrackers is they list the popular posts of the moment in the blogosphere.

What they also do is track the meme as well, see tech.memeorandum.

But the tracking part is more quality than quantity, under each meme (post), memeorandum will list a handful of posts under a heading called “Discussion”…these discussion posts all have links to the meme.
If you want to see more of these you can click on the choice of “Link Search” engines eg. Technorati.

So these discussion posts are a sample of the quality incoming link posts to the meme…there’s is no use showing all the Technorati incoming links.

How are the discussion posts chosen amongst all the incoming links?
Maybe they are the most popular blog or posts themselves from the bunch.

Megite and TailRank work a similar way, they list popular meme’s, and a handful of incoming links (Discussion posts) for each meme.

Related Items

Besides the quality of meme’s, what makes memeorandum stand out even further is the “Related Items” feature

…under each meme there may be a heading called “Related Items”, this post does not link to the meme, but it is about the same/similar thing.

So how does the machine know this?
It must do some type of text analysis of the title and/or body of the post…if a chunk of text is similar, they must be about the same thing.

And again, just like the meme, this related item also has discussion items, and link searches.

Personal View

TailRank and Megite can both limit the view to your OPML, which memeorandum doesn’t offer.

TailRank has some manual override on their offering, they call the personal TailRank view, “Filter”…now you can filter to only see posts from your OPML, sorted by date, and set a limit to only see posts based on the number of incoming links it has.

The lowest is 2, but if you could set this to zero, then I would assume I could see every post from my OPML (Filter) ordered by time, in this case I might as well use my own RSS Reader.

If I set this to 5, I would only see only posts from my OPML that have 5 incoming links or above…so a post that only has 2 incoming links won’t be shown.

In the future I’ve been told this may have an option to be sorted by popularity, this is what I want, to see every post ordered by popularity.

Then added to this, I could query - show me posts ordered by popularity, that have been published, only in the last hour, only the last day, all unread posts, etc..so this is like a quantity slider scenario.

What about a quality slider…show me posts from my OPML, not based on quantity of links to posts in my OPML (filter), but the quality of links to posts in my OPML (filter).
If set on high, this will show posts in my OPML (filter), where they must have incoming links from a post/s that has many incoming links itself…or from a blog that has many incoming links…or a blog that may have low incoming links, but from a greater number of different blogs.

I really like these features, it queries your OPML like a database, which I was getting at towards the end of my last post.

Another suggestion from the TailRank crew was to be able to mark what you have read…now this is starting to sound like a replacement for your RSS reader.

Anyway, TailRank do a great job enabling you to view your OPML by relevancy (based on quantity levels of popularity)

…the only thing it doesn’t do is list related items next to each meme, just like memeorandum does.

But they are thinking of a suggested posts section, where you can view recommended posts:
- probably based on common feeds you have with other OPML’s
- common links that appear in your filtered posts
- based on similar chunks of text in your filtered posts

But still I like the way Memeorandum tracks the meme by placing Related Items for each post where available, instead of a separate section just for recommended posts in general according to my OPML (well they can’t anyway as they don’t accept OPML’s).

What I want

I want what memeorandum does, but based on my own set of blogs (OPML)

That is, view just popular meme’s from my OPML, features some discussion links

And also show related items based on text analysis and common links with other read/unread posts from my OPML and/or the blogosphere.

I’d like to override the results by filtering by incoming links (if I set this to zero, I will see all posts by either date or popularity, and then sort this by time ranges (last hour, last day, etc..))

I’d like to mark what I’ve read…any RSS reader out there willing to make an RSS reader into a personal memetracker…this could be the new type of RSS reader…personal memereaders.

NOTE: There could also be another popularity method, using reading behaviour like Rojo, and Findory.