I read this post a couple of days ago when I was trying to cope with all the things that happened in the Blogsphere while I was traveling. This is a really well written and insightful post wrote by Robert Scoble about Memetracker vs. Web Feed Readers.
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I miss my RSS reading. Reading RSS makes me smarter, not snarkier. Why? Cause I choose who I’m going to read. Pick smart people to read and you’ll get smarter.
Hint, the smartest people in my RSS are usually the least snarky. Why? Cause they could give a f**k about all the traffic.
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I totally agree with Robert on this one, and it is probably a reason why I do not give much importance to memetrackers and that I only subscribe to their RSS feeds: I give them the same importance as any other bloggers.
However, memetrackers and blog search engines have the same problem: when you try to discover new blogs and new articles that may be of interest to you, you always get the same people and the same blog posts.
Unpopular bloggers have really good ideas. However, nobody finds them because they are not popular and they are not popular because they don’t give care at all about being popular.
The problem is that all these services generally use some sort of ranking system; the type of system popularized by Google. However ranking systems are not built to show you the best results, they show you the most popular results with the premise that they are the best; but they rarely are not. So, now – how can I find these bright people? How can I read their awesome ideas?
That’s what I want: I want something that helps me manage the information in such a way that it will aggregate information that may be of interest or use to me, and not necessarily the information that for whatever reason is of interest to the rest of the planet.
Yeah right … I am dreaming in technicolour … and I know that many people have been working on that problem for ages; however, I’m impatient and I can’t wait to see a real breakthrough as it unfolds in front of the general public.
During that time, I want to connect with and talk to people that have the same or similar interests as I do, rather than spending hours weekly trying to find these people using the current services available on the Web.
Technorati: Memetracker | blog | popularity | people | blogger | find | search | information | knowledge |