The folks over at Megite (who are doing a memetracker along the lines of Memeorandum, or TailRank) are working on a personizable memetracker. Here they took my OPML file, fed it into their system, and out comes a special edition of Megite using just my reading sources. Compare this to Memeorandum/Tech or TailRank today and you’ll see it’s more Microsoft-centric and more developer-centric than Memeorandum is.
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Robert Scoble works at Fast Company.TV (title: Managing Director). Everything here, though, is his personal opinion and is not read or approved before it is posted. No warranties or other guarantees will be offered as to the quality of the opinions or anything else offered here.
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February 13th, 2006 at 8:57 am
[...] Scoble reports on a “personal memetracker” from Megite. [...]
February 13th, 2006 at 10:20 am
[...] http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/02/13/megite-working-on-personal-memetracker/ [...]
February 13th, 2006 at 10:29 am
Tracking the COMPLETE CONVERSATION - Part 3
(Updates at the bottom)Stowe Boyd introduces the concept of the Conversational Index:“…successful blogs — ones that were currently viable and vibrant, and those that were on a growth trajectory from their start — shared a common characteristic: T…
February 13th, 2006 at 10:34 am
What I find entertaining is (at the moment) scoble’s number two link is for “Breast Shaper” ;)
“Listen up ladies and those who abuse steroids: get those breasts in shape with the Bust Doctor. It is an aid for misshapen breasts and includes… ”
clearly a lot of bookmarks scoble’s bookmarks must be relating to the shapelyness of his bosom? perhaps ones personal meme page isn’t something we should want to make public?
reminds me of Gmail’s webclips, while emptying my spam folder today, the webclips were trying to interest me in recepes for “spam linguini” at recipes.com…
by which i mean, machine intelligence may have come so far and yet so far to go…
February 13th, 2006 at 10:38 am
Sounds the same as Findory Favorites, Robert.
Go to Findory.com, click the Favorites link in the upper right corner, then import your OPML. What you get is a personalized selection of top stories from your favorite feeds.
Is there a difference?
February 13th, 2006 at 11:09 am
Greg, I’ll check that out!
February 13th, 2006 at 11:25 am
I see nothing special here, just a list of the latest posts from your OPML file. How is this different to just having an aggregator? I see nothing that tech.meme offers such as relevance or filtering topics.
This is just latest posts with items missing and no real logic to it - not to mention the feature seems to only be open to a few people
personalised memetracking does not scale and just doesn’t work (yet)
February 13th, 2006 at 11:31 am
Nik, it is very pre-beta remember…
Greg, the one difference is that Findory doesn’t do any clustering of stories. That would be a great feature (hint hint!).
btw I’m also testing out Personanlized Megite. My post about it here:
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/megite_testing.php
February 13th, 2006 at 11:34 am
Nik: one HUGE difference. I have thousands of posts come through my aggregator every day (I watch 847 feeds, remember?) This is a much smaller view. It looks like they are doing some link analysis to find popular posts in my group and are not just giving me everything.
February 13th, 2006 at 11:57 am
But if everyone only reads articles that are popular then how is an article going to become popular in the first place?
February 13th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Jaseone, you just put your finger on a much larger question that the whole blogosphere is wrestling with (or should be at least). If all anyone does is read the top links on memeorandum or digg or megite or tailrank or whatever, then doesn’t that just amplify the echo-chamber effect?
February 13th, 2006 at 12:19 pm
Robert: you have 857 feeds and at the moment the relevance rating seems to be only ‘most recent’ - if you keep clicking through that list you will see *Every* post.
That was my whole point about relevance ranking - it is much harder when you have 10-100 sources. Even with thousands of sources, memeorandum gets very boring in quiet times. The blogosphere is not as big as we think it is, especially when our only measure of relevance is links.
Mathew memeorandum lets you take part in those popular conversations so your thoughts can be aired. I guess if people find what you say to be worthwhile they might hang around your blog or subscribe etc.
Showing a top-level view of what is good in your subscriptions is a job for your aggregator - and having worked on this problem in the past I can tell you that it is not easy for a few reasons. The first is because of the lack of links in general, relevance needs to be more than that. Second is that it does not scale, you can not compute a mini-blogosphere relevance rank for each user and hope that you can scale that.. it’s why you don’t have personalised google results :) but kudos to the guys tackling problem, just be aware that it is a well-worn path
February 13th, 2006 at 1:15 pm
I agree with Nik that there’s a huge technical chasm to cross before a “personalized meme tracker” gets really useful. I think progress I make on the memeorandum engine is approaching that, but it’s still far off enough that I’ll pass on hyping it for now.
Richard, I think Nik’s comments are valid even for a pre-beta product, especially given the likely difficulty in delivering what’s promised.
February 13th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
Nik, you said, “it does not scale, you can not compute a mini-blogosphere relevance rank for each user and hope that you can scale that.”
That’s exactly what Findory does, Nik. If you know what you’re doing, you can make it scale. According to Alexa, Findory has about the same traffic as Memeorandum.
February 13th, 2006 at 1:46 pm
Gabe hauled me over the coals offline for my post, but I do see his and Nik’s points that this is a hugely difficult problem to solve. However I give Megite tons of kudos for trying.
Greg, correct me if I’m wrong - but isn’t clustering stories involve a whole lot more computation work than ’simply’ doing personalization? I don’t mean to say what Findory does isn’t complicated, just that I understood that clustering is a lot harder to scale…
February 13th, 2006 at 2:44 pm
I am still interested to hear how the new megite scoble vertical is different from just an ‘all posts’ view in an aggregator ;)
February 13th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Richard, it’s actually the opposite. Clustering is far easier to scale than personalization.
Clustering is just a one-time computation, then you show the same thing to every reader. The run-time computation is trivial, show every reader the same page.
With personalization, you need to generate a different page for every visitor and learn in real-time given any changes. It’s a much, much harder problem. That’s why you see so few people doing it.
If you’re still not sure, consider that one technique for personalization is to first generate clusters, than use those clusters to do personalization. In this case, not only do you have the problem of doing clustering, but on top of all that you have the problem of doing personalization.
February 13th, 2006 at 3:33 pm
I see what you mean Greg, thanks. So would it be difficult to add clustering onto Findory’s personalized pages? That would be a very desirable feature, but I’m not sure I understand the complexity for you to develop it.
February 13th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
Greg I just uploaded my OPML into Findory - it seemed to work but looking at the results I am wondering how you decide what is relevant, because looking at the same feeds in my aggregator and looking at other memetrackers Findory is telling me that other stories are more relevant than what really is.
Richard this is what I was talking about earlier, this is computationaly expensive.
February 13th, 2006 at 3:51 pm
It’s an interesting idea. I’m not sure I want to take Findory in that direction — mostly because Google News, Memeorandum, and others are already emphasizing clustering in their products — but I can see that it would be useful if Findory offered it as well.
I definitely will think about it more. Thanks, Richard.
February 13th, 2006 at 3:53 pm
Thanks, Nik, for trying it out.
Findory decides what is relevant based on the articles you read. Play with it, click at least a few articles, and see if you like the results. Findory learns very quickly.
Thanks again, Nik.
February 13th, 2006 at 5:14 pm
damn it then please ‘unclick’ all the times I clicked on Chris Pirillo’s posts I was just testing it out and I don’t want more of them showing up ;)
Just kidding, good service!
February 13th, 2006 at 5:24 pm
I’ve written something like this. See http://www.mackmo.com/nick/blog/tech/2006/2/13/Personalized-meme-tracking.html
February 13th, 2006 at 5:53 pm
“It’s not available to the public yet - I haven’t had time to work on a few scalability issues yet”
That is where the fun begins ;)
February 13th, 2006 at 10:53 pm
Well, making them personally tuneable is where memetrackers will work, but it’s just another extreme edge-case hoop jump. You can play with bar charts, pie charts, 3D charts or do Visual Sims-like Video game Vistorville tech. It’s all the same raw blog and news meat, just served up differently.
Funny tho, how RSS was supposed to be the end-all solution, and now you need to overlay an automated Editor called a memetracker to make sense of the muck and highlight important things out of the overload. De-evolution finally turning around towards evolution. Eventually, after memetrackers have wore out welcome and can’t be any further tweaked, you’ll get back to a Human-Edited Blog solution. So after all this time, not even back to square one.
This is the part, where I say, ironic. But irony is lost among the memeheads.
February 13th, 2006 at 11:01 pm
Christopher: I used to like reading the Associated Press Wire machine, but most people want just a single page of the world’s news brought to them. Nothing new here.
But, wasn’t it you recently who was piling on against the memetracker saying that people would rather pick their RSS feeds? Maybe that was someone else.
I just want more choices on how I get the news. I also like memetrackers cause they get me out of my nice comfortable 847 feed world.
February 14th, 2006 at 1:24 am
Man Scoble… where have you been. TailRank has been doing this for 1.5 months now
…
In fact:
http://tailrank.com/posts/filter/handle/scobleizer
That’s your filter for the OPML file you gave me…
Kevin
February 14th, 2006 at 1:30 am
Another point… I’ll blog on this tomorrow…
http://tailrank.com/posts/filter/handle/scobleizer?min_ranking=10
You can change the ranking factor to add more or less relevance.
I need to write a long post on this but I’ve been swamped with real work…
Kevin
February 14th, 2006 at 6:08 am
A “personal” is orthogonal to the definition of a meme. A meme is social; an infectious idea. Here is a definition:
As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): “a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation.” “Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. …”
http://www.silcom.com/~barnowl/chain-letter/glossary.htm
February 14th, 2006 at 7:13 am
[...] Beginning of the Attention Engine race Wow, I missed this the first time around… Megite is going letting me do what I’ve been asking Memeorandum (or enyone else that will listen) to let me do for ages - to pivot off my own OPML file. The feature isn’t switched on for everyone yet, but I’ve pinged the Megite developer, Mathew Chen, so hope to hear from him soon. (Update 14 Feb: Matt has got back to me - it’s live! See. Thanks Matt! Robert Scoble has one too. ) Richard MacManus has more info on this. However, it turns out Findory can let me import my OPML too. Today. So I did. This is what I saw after: The main pane provides ‘Top Stories’ based on my OPML file (I uploaded 642 feeds - the other items in my OPML aren’t RSS feeds, they are links to stuff). On the left is a selection of the blogs I’m subscribed to. The upload process is clunky - your need to copy and paste the OPML file source rather then just pointing to an url, but hey, I’m not complaining. I don’t know how the ‘Top Stories’ are decided, but the end result is pretty good. Practically every item is of interest to me. Not suprising really - it’s pivoting off my OPML / Attention data. It’s funny - I’ve been thinking about this a lot recently, so to see services actually switching on some of this stuff is very exciting. But now I’ve actually seen it, I’m asking myself more questions…. So, I ask myself - are the ’Top Stories’ just randomly selected items from the RSS feeds from my OPML file? If so, am I getting a more ’relevant’ experience than if I go to a news tracking site (or ‘meme tracker’) that doesn’t take into account my interests? If so, is that ‘real value’? I’d say maybe not. Randomizing my feedreading experience is not what this is about… What’s the algorithm at work here? Is there one beyond randomization? What data other than my own OPML file is Findory using to determine ‘relevancy’ to me? How could it be improved? I’ve got to play some more… Now I’ve seen it live, I’m more convinced than ever that the ability to render a personalized experience based on Attention data is where its at. And I’m not talking about just clickstreams. Your OPML file (specifically your list of RSS subcriptions) is one example of this Attention data set. It says alot about you: the topics your interested in and the people you listen to, and much more. There is plenty more Attention data that can be leveraged though. My tags, my wishlist, the books I own, etc. We’re just at the beginning of the Attention Engine race. It’s going to be great. - Related: My Attention writings - Tags: OPML, RSS, Attention Filed Under: Web, RSS, Web 2.0, OPML, Attention [...]
February 15th, 2006 at 4:52 am
[...] In Scoble’s comments Gabe Rivera (developer of memeorandum is also fairly positive about what is possible. Richard MacManus links the stories together, but his title is Personalized Clustering: It’s too hard, say developers, quoting from Nik Cubrilovic of OmniDrive : …generating a personal view of the web for each and every person is computationally expensive and thus does not scale, at all. [...]
February 15th, 2006 at 8:46 am
I just got my personalized page … I also really like the idea. There is an excellent thread running through here about the echo-chamber effect. Considering that we can recognize that this effect is real, and can be exacerbated by Memorandum, Digg, and Megite … when one partial solution is using more topic searches from PubSub, Technorati, etc. Not great, but certainly a way to get more inputs into your info stream. Or tributaries to your river of feeds.
February 15th, 2006 at 5:57 pm
BTW … as time has gone by the results are getting really interesting.
Alternative to Memorandum … don’t know yet. Certainly interesting though.
February 16th, 2006 at 1:38 pm
is it different from blogroll?
February 16th, 2006 at 6:34 pm
Grazing Lists
James Corbett, the EirePreneur has some excellent posts of late about Grazing Lists.
I posted about this a while back but I called them Hot Topic lists…I guess they don’t have to be topic based, but the word “hot” was the majo…
February 20th, 2006 at 6:41 pm
[...] Relevancy can be based on your reading behaviour…what you click on, see Findory Favourites [...]
February 21st, 2006 at 4:59 pm
[...] - del.icio.us - Furl BOOKMARK THIS POST: del.icio.us - Furl - Simpy - Watchlist RELATED: Furl - Waypath «« Previous: RSS reading by relevance: OPMLmemetracking [...]
August 2nd, 2006 at 1:08 pm
Comment 10 is gold, its similar to how google works too. Only the bigger pages get spidered/indexed quickly, but you need to be indexed to get big :S