On Innovation

Irfan Kamal July 24th, 2008

Many of us are familiar with Techmeme, a useful news aggregator with a focus on aggregation of tech stories across the web and the blogosphere.  Techmeme has an entertaining sister site (Wesmirch) that aggregates celebrity gossip.   Other popular blog news aggregators include Technorati and search services such as Twingly.

Polymeme is an interesting new entrant attempting to focus a bit differently by clustering stories from a database of over 25,000 blogs across the following relatively unusual categories:

Policy (with sub-categories Economics, Education, International, Law)

Change (with sub-categories Green & Energy, Non-Profit, Social Enterprise, Social Justice)

Culture (with sub-categories Architecture & Design, Arts, Books & Poetry, Theatre & Music)

Media (with sub-categories Advertising, New, Traditional, TV & Cinema)

Science (with sub-categories Evolution, General, Health, Social)

Polymeme claims its technology and processes help its readers identify stories outside of what they describe as an “echo chamber” that results in certain popular ideas or news being reinforced at the expense of other worthy - but less visible - ideas.

What do you think?  Is there an echo chamber effect?  If there is, is it necessarily a bad thing?

It’ll be interesting to follow Polymeme and other companies that try to bring out the less traveled parts of the blogosphere.  (When I checked it out, Polymeme was interesting and did seem to pull up some unique stories, but was very slow — growing pains, I’m guessing.)

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