J Wynia has done something interesting with our Web 2.0 Workgroup OPML file: He’s taken the individual feeds and is running feed posts through Yahoo’s search API to find the most interesting stuff. The end result is here. His overview of what he’s created is here:
So, what’s exactly going on? We’ll take an OPML file, load a snapshot of each feed’s current contents. Then, we’ll loop through each feed item and ask Yahoo how many pages link to it. For each feed, we’ll extract the one item that is most linked to (aka the equiv of Google’s pagerank for choosing the top page for a search). That “top†post will be put on our sampler page as the example of of the feed’s content. The sample page will then contain one item from each feed as well as some information about the feed itself.
I like seeing innovation like this, and since he is linking back to the original post I don’t personally (as a writer of some of the content that appears there) have any copyright issues with what he’s doing.
This is clearly not generating real time data on par with Memeorandum, though. The Yahoo API isn’t able to track links fast enough to understand what’s important just a few minutes after a post appears. But it is a good way to find interesting content that is a week or so old. If you don’t mind being that far behind the cutting edge, its cool.
I’ll be interested in seeing if there are other ways to bring this to more real time.
We’ve added J’s mashup to our web 2.0 workgroup page (link at end of first paragraph).
Originally, I had approached this as a way, for instance to say to people who stumbled upon the Web 2.0 Workgroup and wondered what content they’d find on the sites to see not just whatever happens to be going on at the moment, but the most “interesting” stuff currently in the feeds. In other words, the most stable, representative sample of a given feed. However, in the light of day, I clearly see the potential to push this into other spaces as well.
The points you make are things I’ve thought as the day has gone on as well and are places I’d like to take this. Yahoo worked well as the first proof of concept because it tolerated the hideous inefficiencies that are present.
It’s flattering that you’d even be comparing it to Memeorandum given that it’s the result of a single sleepless night.
Using delicious, Technorati, etc. would definitely help apply the same approach to more current content. A blending of those numbers to determine which post “wins” for a given feed, with weightings for “popular”, “recent”, “links from important sites”, etc. could vary the value assigned to a post and help determine, for a given user, what they’d like to see as their headlines.