Social Blog Aggregators Revisited

Recently, there’s been a number of interesting posts on building personal blog aggregators. This really does seem like the next thing that is going to make some blog company succesful since just there’s just too many feeds to read. Global aggregation and popularity engines like Digg and Techmeme only adds material to read.
I’m sure hundreds of people have had ideas along these lines long since, but this particular strand of meme starts with a request from Ross Mayfield for myMeme, not a personalized version of TechMeme, but a socialized one – “what are people I read, reading”. Sam Ruby promptly put together a prototype implementation based on his feed subscriptions which seems to work — but Gabe Rivera of Techmeme is not convinced by the example. His contention is that Ruby’s example only picks out news that TechMeme was already picking up.

Rivera does have a point — indeed Ruby’s output looks like just the tip of the Digg iceberg, but depending on your goals this might not be a problem. The problem with unread news is not that it is unwritten, but that it is drowning in all the other news. I’d settle for a meMeme that worked as a reliable garbage detector.

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