March 16th, 2009
Beyond aggregation: finding the web's best content
Panel: Marshall Kirkpatrick (VP Content Dev, ReadWriteWeb ), Louis Gray (Author/Publisher, louisgray.com), Gabe Rivera (Founder/CEO, Techmeme), Melanie Baker (Community Mgr, AideRSS Inc), Micah Baldwin (VP Business Dev, Lijit Networks Inc)
People are not reading their RSS readers anymore because of Twitter. Content is flowing at us like Niagara Falls, and we don’t know how to manage it all.
With the help of a script, you can even get Google to list Twitter search results above the normal search results.
A big destination for people these days is Techmeme. It is primarily driven by automation, but lately there is more human contribution. It also looks for situations where a lot of articles are talking about the same thing close in time, kind of like the Google News approach.
PostRank uses social engagement metrics to aggregate interesting content on the web. Based on the blogosphere, it scores the content online.
Lijit works differently than all these. The key to aggregation is going back in time and looking at the most valuable content, says Baldwin. He has a list of 500 bloggers that he personally trusts.
OneSpot is cool because you can throw a few RSS feeds into the engine and it will expose relavent content relating to your feeds.
ReadWriteWeb did an experiment on how to find the weirdest stuff on the web. Delicious, Yahoo Pipes, Post Rank all together. They had their trusted sources and data on how often people trusted those sources.
No matter how good you are, if you aren’t interacting with people, you will never be found.
We are going from a purely algorithmic world (Google), to the old school Yahoo directory style web. We want our information organized for us.
Gabe Rivera explains that it’s a two-pronged beast. There is either not enough to present compelling aggregation, or there is enough content, but there isn’t enough metadata.
Another cool site that is aggregating news in real time is MacBlips.
But what are we really doing here? Is this content discovery speak just for the 1% of techies who cares? I think there needs to be something that will work for everyone. People are used to going to Google and looking for things. But when will we have a search engine that doesn’t require a search term?
Andrew Mager is a web developer at Ning, Inc. in Palo Alto. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
For daily updates on Andrew's activities, follow him on Twitter.
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