On DigitalPolymeme: Track the Blogosphere by (Unusual) Industry Clusters
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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There is indeed a risk of Echo Chamber, as brilliantly argued by Kristof in his recent “Daily Me” Op-Ed: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/opinion/19kristof.html?_r=2&em
However, this is probably the direction we’re headed and you can’t force people in this day and age to read what they’re not really interested in. So polymeme is basically automating what people are already doing with their bookmarks, and lists of favorite news feeds. There is a silver lining though: there should be IMO a “serendpity factor” added to the mix, to “expose” readers to information they have not themselves selected or filtered out. Kinda like the genius function on iTunes, although more open to external recommendations.
The action taken to national disaster is great but it’s a real shame that so many people take advantage of the negative situations.
I mean everytime there is an earthquake, a flood, an oil spill - there’s always a group of heartless people who rip off tax payers.
This is in response to reading that 4 of Oprah Winfreys “angels” got busted ripping off the system. Shame on them!
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/08/19/crimesider/entry5251471.shtml
Bull Sell Property Dubai
excellent writing .