My last post on memetrackers, and also reading feeds by relevancy got me thinking on how this could be applied to Newsmastering engines like the Corante Web Hub.
How could we use the Corante Web Hub as a mini blogosphere memetracker?
Firstly you could submit the CWH OPML to Megite, but what about making your own memetracker.
For each post we need to connect these to other posts within the CWH, and also to the blogosphere in general. We need to make explicit the posts that are pointing to each other in the hub, and other important posts from the blogosphere that are pointing to CWH posts.
We also need to track other posts within the CWH and blogosphere that don’t point to each other, but are about the same thing, via text anaylsis.
Memetrackers like memeorandum do a great job, of not only finding a meme, but more importantly for our focus, tracking a meme (some call this clustering)…other notables are Megite, and TailRank.
READ POSTS SORTED BY DATE
Link search
Each post has a link to a link search engine, like Technorati, IceRocket, BlogPulse Conversation Tracker, Bloglines citations, etc…
Discussion posts
Feature a handful of the posts from a Link Search as Discussion posts
(These discussion posts themselves can also list Link Searches underneath each post).
There must be a method to work out which posts from the link searches will be featured as discussion posts.
Or maybe the discussion posts will be those other CWH posts that point to the current post.
At this stage we don’t want to put our editor out of a job, but the editor doesn’t so much collate/track a meme, the editor moreso collates notable posts of the week.
Related Item
This may be similar to Waypath Related…we need to do text analysis on all CWH posts, so similar CWH posts that don’t link to each other can be connected as they may be talking about the same thing.
Sometimes I see similar posts in the CWH, and think that these could be connected automatically, instead of the editor trying to do it manually.
These Related Items don’t just have to be just from posts within the CWH, they may also include posts from the blogosphere.
A Related item can also have a link to Link Searches, and its own Discussion posts.
Once we are viewing a meme we can choose to manally see the type of discussion posts based on quantity and the quality measures.
Popularity Slider (QUANTITY of incoming links)
For this meme, or show me all memes of all time, sorted by date, but limited to a popularity (by quantity) level of 10 or greater incoming links, ie. don’t show memes that have less than 10 incoming links.
(If this was set to zero, it would be reading the CWH as usual)
For this meme, or show me all memes in the last day, sorted by date, but limited to a popularity (by quantity) level of 2 or greater incoming links.
So these incoming links we are choosing based on our popularity slider are featured as Discussion posts underneath each meme.
QUALITY of incoming links
This meme may have 30 incoming links, but you are asking it to show you 5 of these incoming links as the discussion posts.
So how are these discussion posts chosen, if you choose 5, are these the first 5 incoming links that linked to this meme, or are they based on a qualitative measure…such as, the discussion post was chosen because it had many incoming links of its own, or the actual blog has many incoming links, or it has incoming links from a high amount of different blogs.
Could you do this manually…for this meme, (or show me all memes), not based on how many (quantity) incoming links they have, but on the quality of the incoming links.
Or for this meme show me 5 incoming links of high quality to be featured as Discussion posts, you’d hope this is what would happen anyway.
What does quality mean?
As funny as this sounds, a high quality discussion post (incoming link) may be because that post has a high quantity of incoming links itself…pretty weird huh, quality based on quantity, doesn’t make sense really.
Or, as mentioned before, perhaps the blog itself (all its posts) has a high quantity of incoming links, or even a high number of different blogs that make up its incoming links total.
In this case a meme may have only 20 incoming links (high quantity), but 5 of these incoming links may have many incoming links of its own (high quality)…these 5 incoming links are considered as the most important and may be featured as discussion posts.
Hang on, by quality I mean the discussion item has a high quantity of incoming links of its own…so it is quality in regards to the meme.
The importance of a meme…
A meme may have only 5 incoming links (low quantity), but all these incoming links/blogs may have many incoming links of their own (high quality)…this would be considered just as important, if not more important, than a meme that had 20 incoming links, with only 2 of these incoming links/blogs having many incoming links of their own.
I guess this explains more of how a meme came to be important (why it is being featured) and showing the reasons why it is being features (which is by, listing the discussion posts)
So to recap…
Automatic
- If we are viewing a meme, and ask to see 5 incoming links as discussion posts (as you can do on TailRank), then these would hopefully be the best quality posts and not just the first 5 posts that talked about the meme.
Manual
- Show me a list of all memes, not sorted on how many (quantity) incoming links they have, but sorted on the quality of the incoming links…as compared to show me all the memes with the most incoming links.
eg. Show me all memes in the last day, sorted by date, but limited to a popularity (by quality) level set to high
…would you ever want this set to low, probably, to see the long tail.
Maybe memeorandum uses this quality method to choose its Meme and the Discussion posts that got it there, but as TailRank has started to offer, I would like to also be able to manually choose how many Discussion posts to view.
Speed
I guess the other part of a meme is speed, it may become a meme because so many posts (quality or not) pointed to it in such a quick time…it’s a breaking post, not only because the content is breaking news, but because everyone is talking about this post and what’s in it so quickly…spreading like wild fire.
And what makes a memetracker like memeorandum so powerful is that it connects the other posts talking about the same news unaware others are also breaking this news.
READ POSTS SORTED BY POPULARITY
At the moment posts on the CWH are shown by date order, what about another option based on popularity (most incoming links)
Show me all posts of all time sorted by popularity.
Show me all posts from the last day sorted by popularity.
Show me all posts from the last hour sorted by popularity.
Set Limits
Show me all posts of all time sorted by popularity (but only show me the posts with a popularity - by quantity - of greater than 10 incoming links).
Then choose how many discussion posts you want to see.
Show me all posts from the last day sorted by popularity (but only show me the posts with a popularity - by quantity - of greater than 2 incoming links).
Then choose how many discussion posts you want to see.
Even add a search term to the mix…
Show me all posts from the last day sorted by popularity (but only show me the posts with a popularity - by quantity - of greater than 2 incoming links, with the term “reading list”).
Then choose how many discussion posts you want to see.
Recommended
Like Rojo, the CWH could aggregate all the hyperlinks made within every post, and make a list of the most common links in all CWH posts.
These common links may have value, especially if you find that in the last 7 days, 10 posts have hyperlinked to the same website.
Obviously that most common link would be ranked top position, but an option would be to set this by last hour, day, week, month, all, etc…or even set it to just one blog.
This way I could query, give me a list of the websites I have pointed to in my blog posts, over the last month…I know if I did this for my blog the Technorati homepage would probably make the top of the list.
This is basically what Chuquet does, and I can’t see why any feed set couldn’t do the same with its data. Also what about searching full-text of these outgoing links, or searching a URL.
This would be great, so often I’ve pointed to a website in one of my blog posts, but I can’t remember which post it is, and it’s especially hard to find when the text for the hyperlink is “see more…or see here”.
If I could search outgoing links by URL, I could find the post where I have pointed to this URL.
eg. If I query for this URL..http://www.something.com…it will find which post/s pointed to this site.
I could also say, show me all my blog posts where I point to the Technorati homepage, or any Technorati domain page.
So not only could we use the normal search, to search the full-text of all CWH posts, but we could also search the full-text of all the hyperlinked websites that come from all CWH posts.
Make your own
If CWH could incorporate these features to view data it would be not only a topic hub (Public RSS Aggregator), but also a memetracker, and also aggregate recommended links.
How could I make my own based on my own Reading List (OPML)…services such as MySyndicaat, SuprGlu, Blogdigger Groups, kickRSS, RSSmix, Bozpages, Feedpile, and others would have to do some more tinkering.
Or better still make my RSS reader into a personal memetracker.
It seems others are thinking the same thing, via FreshBlog:
Rethinking Feed Readers…well of course it’s Kevin from TailRank.
[ADDED: Above I mentioned that I wanted to know in which blog post I pointed to a particular URL…if I know the URL how to I know which of my blog posts I mentioned/pointed to it
…I didn’t think of doing a simple link search at a blog or web engine…although this helps, what if I have to scroll through lots of results, well I could include my blog name in the search string or URL: syntax of my blog, that should narrow things down (I got an error).
Regardless this is the idea, but it would be good to limit it to one blog or a set of blogs/feeds (OPML)…maybe a link search in a Rollyo…anyway I thought I could do something more with Yahoo! Site Explorer, but no go].
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