Comments on: Sharing attention while reading feeds http://decafbad.com/blog/2006/01/03/sharing-attention-while-reading-feeds It's all spinning wheels and self-doubt until the first pot of coffee. Fri, 10 Oct 2008 19:42:19 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.7-hemorrhage hourly 1 By: Bill Seitz http://decafbad.com/blog/2006/01/03/sharing-attention-while-reading-feeds#comment-3362 Bill Seitz Fri, 06 Jan 2006 16:45:16 +0000 http://decafbad.com/blog/?p=814#comment-3362 <p>have you look at at TailRank?</p> <p>http://tailrank.com/</p> have you look at at TailRank?

http://tailrank.com/

]]> By: A Feed Is Born » Your own attention feed? - RSS, Webfeeds and Information Overload! http://decafbad.com/blog/2006/01/03/sharing-attention-while-reading-feeds#comment-3351 A Feed Is Born » Your own attention feed? - RSS, Webfeeds and Information Overload! Wed, 04 Jan 2006 22:00:13 +0000 http://decafbad.com/blog/?p=814#comment-3351 <p>[...] Leslie has a post about Attention and wants to combine Attention.xml with his Popular Links algorithm. The algorithm creates his own Popular Links feed (get the code) which basically scans all the current entries of all subscribed feeds for unique hyperlink URLs found in descriptions and summaries. It collates all entries by these links, then sorts by the number of entries under each link. A threshold is applied, filtering for links pointed to by 3 or more entries… At the end, a new feed entry is displaying the most linked-to things of the moment. Think of this as a kind of real-time PageRank (via josh). I think this is great! Leslie is considering of making this script a full-on service: Upload an OPML export from your aggregator and get your own Popular Links feed. Combine it with some Attention.xml and there you go. I think we should encourage the project, and I do hope he stops blogging to save some time;) This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 and is filed under Attention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]</p> [...] Leslie has a post about Attention and wants to combine Attention.xml with his Popular Links algorithm. The algorithm creates his own Popular Links feed (get the code) which basically scans all the current entries of all subscribed feeds for unique hyperlink URLs found in descriptions and summaries. It collates all entries by these links, then sorts by the number of entries under each link. A threshold is applied, filtering for links pointed to by 3 or more entries… At the end, a new feed entry is displaying the most linked-to things of the moment. Think of this as a kind of real-time PageRank (via josh). I think this is great! Leslie is considering of making this script a full-on service: Upload an OPML export from your aggregator and get your own Popular Links feed. Combine it with some Attention.xml and there you go. I think we should encourage the project, and I do hope he stops blogging to save some time;) This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 4th, 2006 and is filed under Attention. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. [...]

]]> By: Phil Wilson http://decafbad.com/blog/2006/01/03/sharing-attention-while-reading-feeds#comment-3347 Phil Wilson Wed, 04 Jan 2006 16:38:10 +0000 http://decafbad.com/blog/?p=814#comment-3347 <p>Presumably your subscription list needs to be of a certain size before you can start extracting interesting URLs or you'll just have 20 URLs mentioned twice and 50 URLs mentioned once.</p> <p>If you were to just read the short head of your popular items list, would this actually be encouraging people to be infovores rather than normal information consumers (where you read or at least skim all of the items in your aggregator)? i.e. the data only starts working for you when you collect enough feeds. Gosh, you could have your own little long-tail on your desktop ;)</p> Presumably your subscription list needs to be of a certain size before you can start extracting interesting URLs or you’ll just have 20 URLs mentioned twice and 50 URLs mentioned once.

If you were to just read the short head of your popular items list, would this actually be encouraging people to be infovores rather than normal information consumers (where you read or at least skim all of the items in your aggregator)? i.e. the data only starts working for you when you collect enough feeds. Gosh, you could have your own little long-tail on your desktop ;)

]]> By: Anne Zelenka http://decafbad.com/blog/2006/01/03/sharing-attention-while-reading-feeds#comment-3332 Anne Zelenka Tue, 03 Jan 2006 19:26:21 +0000 http://decafbad.com/blog/?p=814#comment-3332 <p>That Ch. 15 script looks very useful, though I haven't had a chance to try it yet. The attention.xml thing... interesting but don't know how it would work with three-panel newsreaders like Bloglines. I'm not necessarily interested in a post just because I skimmed the latest articles in a certain feed. I didn't know before I clicked on the feed name whether I'd be interested in the latest stuff. Much of the time I'm not interested.</p> <p>What I'd like to see is some smart recommendation engine that watches how I read, how much time I spend on a certain article display, whether I click through the links it has, and even provides a "boring" button like some other commenter suggested so it could do some Bayesian filtering. That's getting far beyond what you've described here but what you're describing is a start on it. </p> <p>Another somewhat different issue is that Memeorandum works by limiting itself to a certain very popular and generic set of issues. Once you have one Memeorandum for politics or tech do you need another? Might individual quirks of attention (like the fact that you are interested in Detroit and I am interested in Maui) make sharing individual attention.xmls less useful? I've never really gotten the social sharing bug though so maybe I'm just showing a lack of imagination.</p> <p>But just because Memeorandum already exists doesn't mean there isn't a real opportunity. While it's easy to find the hot conversations on politics and tech in the blogosphere, other domains are poorly aggregated and filtered, if at all. I follow mom blogs and feminist blogs and nothing like Memeorandum or digg or reddit exists for those yet there are regularly hot topics that ripple through them. What you describe could be used to build something for those and other domains on the web but is there room for everyone to do it individually? Or will people gravitate to one or a few sites that do a good job of highlighting popular and important conversations in certain well-defined domains?</p> <p>These are just my raw thoughts on it... your ideas are inspiring.</p> That Ch. 15 script looks very useful, though I haven’t had a chance to try it yet. The attention.xml thing… interesting but don’t know how it would work with three-panel newsreaders like Bloglines. I’m not necessarily interested in a post just because I skimmed the latest articles in a certain feed. I didn’t know before I clicked on the feed name whether I’d be interested in the latest stuff. Much of the time I’m not interested.

What I’d like to see is some smart recommendation engine that watches how I read, how much time I spend on a certain article display, whether I click through the links it has, and even provides a “boring” button like some other commenter suggested so it could do some Bayesian filtering. That’s getting far beyond what you’ve described here but what you’re describing is a start on it.

Another somewhat different issue is that Memeorandum works by limiting itself to a certain very popular and generic set of issues. Once you have one Memeorandum for politics or tech do you need another? Might individual quirks of attention (like the fact that you are interested in Detroit and I am interested in Maui) make sharing individual attention.xmls less useful? I’ve never really gotten the social sharing bug though so maybe I’m just showing a lack of imagination.

But just because Memeorandum already exists doesn’t mean there isn’t a real opportunity. While it’s easy to find the hot conversations on politics and tech in the blogosphere, other domains are poorly aggregated and filtered, if at all. I follow mom blogs and feminist blogs and nothing like Memeorandum or digg or reddit exists for those yet there are regularly hot topics that ripple through them. What you describe could be used to build something for those and other domains on the web but is there room for everyone to do it individually? Or will people gravitate to one or a few sites that do a good job of highlighting popular and important conversations in certain well-defined domains?

These are just my raw thoughts on it… your ideas are inspiring.

]]> By: Daniel Nicolas http://decafbad.com/blog/2006/01/03/sharing-attention-while-reading-feeds#comment-3329 Daniel Nicolas Tue, 03 Jan 2006 15:39:45 +0000 http://decafbad.com/blog/?p=814#comment-3329 <p>I think you could get away with charging $5 for a service like that. Maybe even $10 if it was all web-based with cool ajaxyness flowing out of it.</p> I think you could get away with charging $5 for a service like that. Maybe even $10 if it was all web-based with cool ajaxyness flowing out of it.

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