Right... I've been using Bloglines for a littel while now. My approach is to use Bloglines as a means of storing the RSS feed of any blog that I might be interested in, and then to scroll through my collection every couple of days. As you mentioned -- no reputation. I definitely don't count on my Blogline feeds "recommending" anything that's any more interesting than the topic of the blog... the information I recieve is thus left to the discretion of the blogger.

Actually, I got the link wrong; the bookmarklet took the wrong URL and title associations. I've updated the original post.

But yes, I agree that Bloglines is nothing but a straightforward aggregator. It is very competent at what it does, but it is more like webmail (you expect it gets and manages content, consistently) than anything intelligent. Obviously, we're going to go to smarter RSS tools, because it is very easy to build totally ridiculous OPML files.

RE: Bloglines | My Feeds (1760) (301)

Like a lot of people, I find that the web is becoming my main source of news. Some of the sites I read are published by individuals, but I find the most informative sites are those published by groups of writers/editors/correspondents, including those put out by Main Steam Media (MSM). However for the past three months my main source of "what's new" has been a new breed of website that collaboratively votes on the best links.

This genre does not have an official name yet, but each of these sites supplies readers with pointers to news items that are ranked by other readers. None of these sites generates news; they only point to it by filtering the links to newsy items. Using different formulas they rank an ever moving list of links on the web. The velocity of their lists varies by site, but some will have a 100% turnover in a few days. I check them daily.

This is a nice overview of the competition (minus reputation...)

Update: It assigned the wrong link. Fixed.

Cool Tool: Consensus Web Filters

As you’ll quickly realize, the features and functionalities offered within myYearbook enable teenagers to facilitate and optimize their real-world social lives and their careers as high school students. Conversely, if you’re not on myYearbook, you will be at a disadvantage, one that becomes more severe with time. For instance, in schools where the teens have adopted myYearbook, parties are planned with the service, they collaborate on classes and extracurricular activities, you can see who’s popular or who lives near you with similar interests… even their search engine is optimized for socialization. Of course, this is all on top of pretty much everything you can do with MySpace. In a complete reversal of the first ten years of online communities, where the inhabitants were the edge cases of society as I described above, for a teen in a high school today where myYearbook has presence, the edge case is the one that doesn’t belong to the service. Consequently, this is something that is not well understood by many “older” execs and investors today.

Nice business model, too.

GigaOM : » David vs. Murdoch er …. Goliath.

Just in case Tim O'Reilly is running short on buzz phrases, I'm going to contribute another one suggested by the mix at eTech. In the early days of cybernetics, many applications were in the control of aerospace systems. Many of those control loops unavoidably involved the presence of homo sapiens in the cockpit, leading to the phrase Human in the Loop (HITL). As the linked article dryly observes "The adaptability of human operators made the basic approach of extracting equivalent transfer functions enormously challenging." (Translation: Under carefully controlled conditions, the experimental subject will do what he damn well pleases.)

...

Or we can look at the Mechanical Turk, where humans can literally be put into a program loop. And not just a single human, a whole marketplace is the big vision. Which are known to get complex. I grew up writing EXTERNAL statements; will the next generation need to write 'EXTERNALITY' declarations on their jobs?

Due Diligence: Humans in the Loop

Memestreams.net suggestion -- there should be a draft saving option on the recommend page.

What I really like about the bookmarklet, and the general interface, is that it is really easy to save a link to my feed. I generally use it as a clipping service for my own reference, rather than have additional content scattered onto a site like Bloglines.

I feel that writing up a point, or responding to an article, requires time. It is easy to write stream of conscious, but that does not make a great entry. I noticed a big difference between the options of a site like LiveJournal (post now!) and Wordpress (compose your posts, set a release date, juggle multiple entries) -- and I think that is reflected on the quality of the content often found.

Sometimes I see something that I'd like to clip AND comment on, but I lack the time. It would be nice if there was a "Save Draft" button below. It would save whatever I've typed but keep the content private; I could go to Memestreams to resume the entry and post it to my stream.

The writing quality of the site would improve... but the rants would decrease... maybe that isn't a goal for the site.

How sad that today, rather than encouraging people to do the same today for issues that Commoncause supports, they have lost faith in their supporters willingness to support causes from their own initiative. Instead, they have chosen to become a large scale spammer.

THey must consider their supporters untrustable drones. Why else provide form letters for them to send rather than letting the supporters provide their own perspective on issues ? They must not trust their drones to take action either. Why else create an automated spamming system rather than providing emails or snail mail addresses for their supporters to use on their own ?

Which leads to the reason for this post.

Last month i wrote a post saying why I thought there could be value to tiered levels of service on the internet. Some people agreed. Some disagreed. The beauty was in the discussion that resulted.

Discussion, its a beautiful thing. The exchange of ideas. It leads to better ideas.

Well the spammers at commoncause.org decided that they should spam me with the following form letter.

I agree with the principle that just because the technology lets you make it easy for some to "get involved"... that is not necessarily the right thing to do. This form letter shows exactly why; the user got to click a message to show their support. But it has no effect, because the user is not informed.

Perhaps this is useful for congressional issues -- you know that the Congressman is not and will not be reading your letter. If you are going to be summarized into a histogram, you might as well not spend the effort to craft something. I know, because every time I have written to a Congress member, the response back has been a form letter -- and generally not even one based on the opinion I expressed (ie, TOPIC_FORM rather than PRO_TOPIC_FORM / CON_TOPIC_FORM). The form letter responses have no impact.

In this case, as a responsive host but not a civil servant, Cuban is open to a discussion. But the form letter was not particularly well researched. All that it tells him is that there is rabble being roused on a website, and people are willing to be roused to the point of filling in their email address. Woo!

I get a number of petitions from activist-types like my sister. This multiple tiered Internet is pretty high activity (and not particularly well understood). My sister forwarded me a petition from MoveOn.org about it. You can see a sample on snopes.com. The premise is that because companies will have the option to pay to be excluded from spam traps, non-profits will no longer be able to send email. Which isn't true unless you don't understand the reason for the proposal (adding a money trail adds an accountability trail). I won't click an auto-petition, now, because this is an example where the petition is not formulated by the better informed. If I care, I'll become informed and figure out my own response.

Commoncause.org is a spammer - Blog Maverick - www.blogmaverick.com _

Last weekend, two prominent technology bloggers, Dave Winer of the venerable Scripting News and Robert Scoble of the Microsoft-sponsored Scobleizer, expressed their frustration with Tech Memeorandum, a popular website that highlights the headlines of technology-related stories appearing in blogs, newspapers and other media. In Winer's view, Memeorandum has turned into a tedious contest "with one blogger trying to top another for the most vacuous post." Scoble, echoing Winer's complaint, announced that he was going to avoid looking at Memeorandum "for at least a week" and instead rely on his self-selected RSS feeds to track technology news. Others have also been critical of Memeorandum, suggesting that its content is overly narrow or that it draws from too small a pool of sources.

Difference between Memestreams and Memeorandum, apparently, is that the small pool for Memeorandum is A-list; Memestreams has lower profile technologists.

Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: The editor and the crowd

The idea behind attention is very simple. I know, because it's my idea. Doc Searls introduced me to Dave Sifry at a party, and Dave and I sat in the corner for two hours and brainstormed how to turn that idea into reality. Later, I came down to Technorati's office and fleshed the idea out, describing what I do (did) with NetNewsWire and how I wanted to do it better. Dave sat there, taking notes, debriefing me in a classic deconstruction of what I did with RSS data, what I found important, and what the inforouter (my name for an aggregator on steroids) could do to improve information transfer.

Soon the outlines of a spec emerged; who, what, and for how long feed data was being consumed. I insisted that OPML be used as the first bootstrap of subscription data. Sifry, in the throes of establishing a business out of Technorati, seemed to sense the value of attention, but had to fit it in with many other priorities in allocating resources. In my role as a member of the Technorati Advisory board, I evangelized what I saw as attention's profound value proposition as RSS adoption accelerated the need to deal with a second order magnitude of information overload. I also surfaced the idea on a series of blogs, first at CRN, then at eWEEK, and lately at ZDNet/CNET.

» Waiting for Attention… or something like it | Steve Gillmor's InfoRouter | ZDNet.com

Information overload has become the typical issue of anyone using the web to access or search for nuggets of information. Both the search and the subscription paradigms lead to countless results, posts, articles that one needs to sift through to extract relevant facts. Using Attention metadata (blog subscriptions, document hyperlinks, URLs and keywords entered by a web user,…) is one of the mechanisms infrastructure providers will use to elevate relevant pieces of information – as demonstrated today by the first generation of meme trackers (like Memeorandum, TailRank,…).

Memestreams should be a part of this discussion.

Our host for the March session of the Search SIG is one of the pioneers of the Attention movement: Steve Gillmor, as the co-founder of the AttentionTrust and co-creator of the original Attention.xml specification with Technorati’s Dave Sifry, has evangelized the growing importance of Attention metadata over the past two years. He is also the host of the famous podcasting series: Gillmor Gang, Gillmor Daily and AttentionTech.

Does Memestreams do anything like Attention.xml? It seems like it should be very feasible.

Jeff Clavier's Software Only: SDForum Search SIG: The Search for Attention - March 16th 6:30pm @ AOL - Featuring FeedBurner, Memeorandum, Root Markets & Technorati

Rule #3: Stocks with attractive IR women are no more likely to appreciate than average, but they are more fun to cover. Stocks are, in the end, a good that is subject to the normal laws of supply and demand.

A CEO who hires an attractive IR woman understands marketing; after all, his target demographic — financial analysts at large investment firms — is almost exclusively male and geeky. Unfortunately, these same CEOs have a propensity to overspend and have questionable judgement (tending to, say, sleep with members of the IR department). Thus, on balance, these stocks are not any more likely to perform better than stocks with unattractive IR women or men but, if you are in the aforementioned demographic, you are more likely to enjoy your time with the company. That’s a net win for you. Half of investing is picking the right asset class.

Long or Short Capital » Mr Juggles Investing Commandments (#3 & #4)