I just discovered some new behaviour from Talk Digger users while I was analyzing the server logs. I found that some users (intentionally or not) are using Del.icio.us not to bookmark Talk Digger’s website, but to bookmark discussions Talk Digger has helped to discover.

How does this work?

1- Someone finds an interesting page somewhere on the Internet and wants to know who else is talking about it. To demonstrate, let’s take an article of the Washington Post called Bush Speaks Out for Rumsfeld.

2- They copy the URL of that web page, and then go to

http://www.talkdigger.com/?dig_url=http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/04/14/AR2006041401649.html

That way they start a search to find the discussion evolving around that piece of news, using Talk Digger.

3- Finally they copy that URL and bookmark it using Del.icio.us. That way they only have to login into their Del.icio.us user account and click on the bookmark to see the discussion they are “tracking” using Del.icio.us.

It’s great that users are sharing with the Del.icio.us community their interests for a particular piece of news (website, blog, etc) by tagging it with different tag names. Then other people from the community can save that same bookmark and start following the discussion too.

If you read my last blog posts about the future of Talk Digger and what I am working on right now, you will probably find out that this is the same idea that is behind the sort of “portal” that I am developing for the “next generation” of Talk Digger.

The purpose of the “portal” will be to help users find other users with the same interests while following a specific conversation that is beginning to evolve on the Internet. The premise of the idea is that people with similar interests will find each other by checking and displaying which users are tracking the same stories.

For now, what is really interesting is to see how users of two totally different web services can use them in conjunction to answer one their persistent needs.

Technorati: Delicious | del.icio.us | talkdigger | conversation | discussion | track | follow | web2.0 | bookmark |

TalkDigger is quietly evolving toward something new. I have been thinking for some time now about how Talk Digger might evolve and how the “conversations evolving on the Internet” paradigm could be extended. I have had many ideas in the past months, some better and bigger than others.

Then I told myself: Fred, you have to start somewhere.

This is obvious; but there’s a significant process behind that obvious affirmation.

Here’s what I have done since I came back from India: I started somewhere. I started to develop a new feature (in fact it is a whole new infrastructure), layered above which I will be able to build other things. The process is quite simple; think small first, and extend features and functionality later.

Easy to say, and it’s what I’m doing … but the result is not that simple.

So now, which direction is Talk Digger taking?

the vision is always the same: helping people find, follow and enter discussions which are evolving on the Internet. With the current capabilities of Talk Digger, a user can find discussions somewhat easily. The results are sometimes good, and at other times not so good. The presentation is normal and somewhat intuitive, as it mimics the user interface of traditional search engines.

Talk Digger also generate RSS feeds with search results. This feature is really interesting because you will receive new results [new discussion’s items] directly in your web feed reader. However, the interaction between web-feed-readers / Talk Digger / search-engines is not that good. Some results are marked as new day after day, etc. It is a good start but it is not enough for me, and certainly not for Talk Digger users.

As you know, Talk Digger is not that bad, but there’s definitely room (and the need) to upgrade it. One of the core problems is that all the requests are processed in real time. It is good for me, because I can easily host Talk Digger on low cost web servers. However, this advantage is not that good for the users. It was a first step; now I have to go forward with the next steps.

So, what are those next steps? Archiving data, and then with that data I will be able to develop ideas that are impossible without the stored archived data.

This is the first next step: developing a Talk Digger Crawler, gathering data, archiving and updating it.

After that I intend to create a community infrastructure, in order to:

• Help people to define themselves by their works, their interests, and their relations with other people.
• Help people to find someone that they could connect with.
• Help people to get connected and communicate with other community members.

I also to create an upgraded infrastructure to track and define conversations, so as to:

• Help people to easily track conversations.
• Help people to find interesting conversations.

Finally, I plan to create an infrastructure that lets people easily enter into a discussion they have found using Talk Digger.

That is it.

With these new features, Talk Digger will go a step further into the direction of its driving vision: helping people to find, follow and enter into conversations which are evolving on / in the Internet.

Some people may think that I am trying to shovel clouds, but I am not. The development of this “new system” is on the way. In about 2 months I should start to distribute private access to some people to test the new system. That way in about 3 months or so, if everything goes fine, I should publicly release this new version.

Naturally I will keep you in touch with the developments! If anything crosses your mind while reading this post, please leave a comment below… who knows, it certainly might be helpful to me!

Technorati: Talkdigger | conversation | discussion | community | interaction | development | crawler | infrastructure |

Many people that I talked about in my blog posts, and to whom I linked, have left comments on these blog posts. Now, what I would like to check is to what degree people use services like Talk Digger to find out who’s talking about them, what they’re saying and help them make contact to talk more and/or start a new relationship.

So, what I am going to do is write a list of the names of people I read who are not subscribed to my web feed (or that I think are not). And the intention of this blog post is to ping specific people by using links on my blog.

So, if you are one of these people … it would be nice to leave a short comment on this blog post telling me that you found it via the link I’ve made to your blog letting me know what you used to find it (it’s not obligatory that this be Talk Digger 😉 )

So there is the list:

Danah Boyd, Robert Scoble, Darren Rowse, Steve Rubel, Andy Wibbels, Toby, Scott Ginsberg, Paul Graham, Seth Godin, Jeff Cornwall, David H. Beisel, Amber Mac, Anil Dash, Daniel Lemire, Jack Vinson, Lilia Efimova, David Sifry, Matthew Hurst, John Battelle, Kevin Burton, John Tropea, David Weinberger, Michael Arrington

I have no idea what the results of this experiment will be , but I think that they could be interesting and maybe even surprising.

Technorati: Contact | ping | relationship | blog | blogger | talkdigger |

I am pleased to announce that Talk Digger support Feedster again. The Feedster development team closed their back-link service a couple of months ago. It seems that they implemented it in a new way (looks like Technocrati’s way) during my departure. So I just finished supporting it again.

I am happy because it was a good real time indexed blog search engine, despite the troubles they had a couple of months ago. However their new architecture seems to be much better (the GUI and under the hood). I hope you will find their results useful!

I also fixed a glitch found by Mr. Ataka with the RSS module of Talk Digger and another one that I found while fixing the previous one. So if you had some strange behaviors, it could be fixed; if you always have some, then contact me as soon as possible so I will be able to fix it.

Technorati: Talkdigger | feedster | rss |

I released a couple of new features in Talk Digger today. The first one is a request of John Tropea. I added a new option when you create a RSS feed. Now you can exclude the results with the same domain name as the searched URL’s. So, if you create a RSS feed with the URL “fgiasson.com/blog/”, then all the results with the domain name “fgiasson.com” will be excluded of the feed. Also have in mind that the duplicated results (two times the same URL) are also excluded from the RSS feed.

I also added a new option that let you enable or disable the PageRank feature. So if you do not like the feature and think that it just clutters your user interface, then you only have to uncheck the option and the PageRank will not be displayed for the results anymore.

If you have any other ideas to improve Talk Digger, or find a bug with what I changed, please contact me without any hesitation!

Technorati: Talkdigger | rss | feed | social | web2.0 | pagerank |