Scobleizer - Latest Comments in Megite working on personal memetracker

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Jim — Wed, 02 Aug 2006 16:08:07 -0000

Comment 10 is gold, its similar to how google works too. Only the bigger pages get spidered/indexed quickly, but you need to be indexed to get big :S

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

CetaMac — Thu, 16 Feb 2006 16:38:01 -0000

is it different from blogroll?

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Tris Hussey — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 20:57:56 -0000

BTW ... as time has gone by the results are getting really interesting.

Alternative to Memorandum ... don't know yet. Certainly interesting though.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Tris Hussey — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 11:46:48 -0000

I just got my personalized page ... I also really like the idea. There is an excellent thread running through here about the echo-chamber effect. Considering that we can recognize that this effect is real, and can be exacerbated by Memorandum, Digg, and Megite ... when one partial solution is using more topic searches from PubSub, Technorati, etc. Not great, but certainly a way to get more inputs into your info stream. Or tributaries to your river of feeds.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Ralph Poole — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 09:08:24 -0000

A "personal" is orthogonal to the definition of a meme. A meme is social; an infectious idea. Here is a definition:

As defined by Richard Dawkins in The Selfish Gene (1976): "a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation." "Examples of memes are tunes, ideas, catch-phrases, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms or eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. ..."
www.silcom.com/~barnowl/cha...

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Kevin Burton — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 04:30:39 -0000

Another point... I'll blog on this tomorrow...

http://tailrank.com/posts/f...

You can change the ranking factor to add more or less relevance.

I need to write a long post on this but I've been swamped with real work...

Kevin

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Kevin Burton — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 04:24:16 -0000

Man Scoble... where have you been. TailRank has been doing this for 1.5 months now

...

In fact:

http://tailrank.com/posts/f...

That's your filter for the OPML file you gave me...

Kevin

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

scobleizer — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 02:01:42 -0000

Christopher: I used to like reading the Associated Press Wire machine, but most people want just a single page of the world's news brought to them. Nothing new here.

But, wasn't it you recently who was piling on against the memetracker saying that people would rather pick their RSS feeds? Maybe that was someone else.

I just want more choices on how I get the news. I also like memetrackers cause they get me out of my nice comfortable 847 feed world.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Christopher Coulter — Tue, 14 Feb 2006 01:53:16 -0000

Well, making them personally tuneable is where memetrackers will work, but it's just another extreme edge-case hoop jump. You can play with bar charts, pie charts, 3D charts or do Visual Sims-like Video game Vistorville tech. It's all the same raw blog and news meat, just served up differently.

Funny tho, how RSS was supposed to be the end-all solution, and now you need to overlay an automated Editor called a memetracker to make sense of the muck and highlight important things out of the overload. De-evolution finally turning around towards evolution. Eventually, after memetrackers have wore out welcome and can't be any further tweaked, you'll get back to a Human-Edited Blog solution. So after all this time, not even back to square one.

This is the part, where I say, ironic. But irony is lost among the memeheads.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Nik Cubrilovic — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:53:46 -0000

"It's not available to the public yet - I haven't had time to work on a few scalability issues yet"

That is where the fun begins ;)

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Nick Lothian — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:24:14 -0000

I've written something like this. See http://www.mackmo.com/nick/...

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Nik Cubrilovic — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 20:14:44 -0000

damn it then please 'unclick' all the times I clicked on Chris Pirillo's posts I was just testing it out and I don't want more of them showing up ;)

Just kidding, good service!

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Greg Linden — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:53:35 -0000

Thanks, Nik, for trying it out.

Findory decides what is relevant based on the articles you read. Play with it, click at least a few articles, and see if you like the results. Findory learns very quickly.

Thanks again, Nik.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Greg Linden — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:51:18 -0000

It's an interesting idea. I'm not sure I want to take Findory in that direction -- mostly because Google News, Memeorandum, and others are already emphasizing clustering in their products -- but I can see that it would be useful if Findory offered it as well.

I definitely will think about it more. Thanks, Richard.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Nik Cubrilovic — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:51:09 -0000

Greg I just uploaded my OPML into Findory - it seemed to work but looking at the results I am wondering how you decide what is relevant, because looking at the same feeds in my aggregator and looking at other memetrackers Findory is telling me that other stories are more relevant than what really is.

Richard this is what I was talking about earlier, this is computationaly expensive.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Richard MacManus — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:33:33 -0000

I see what you mean Greg, thanks. So would it be difficult to add clustering onto Findory's personalized pages? That would be a very desirable feature, but I'm not sure I understand the complexity for you to develop it.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Greg Linden — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 18:09:34 -0000

Richard, it's actually the opposite. Clustering is far easier to scale than personalization.

Clustering is just a one-time computation, then you show the same thing to every reader. The run-time computation is trivial, show every reader the same page.

With personalization, you need to generate a different page for every visitor and learn in real-time given any changes. It's a much, much harder problem. That's why you see so few people doing it.

If you're still not sure, consider that one technique for personalization is to first generate clusters, than use those clusters to do personalization. In this case, not only do you have the problem of doing clustering, but on top of all that you have the problem of doing personalization.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Nik Cubrilovic — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 17:44:43 -0000

I am still interested to hear how the new megite scoble vertical is different from just an 'all posts' view in an aggregator ;)

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Richard MacManus — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:46:05 -0000

Gabe hauled me over the coals offline for my post, but I do see his and Nik's points that this is a hugely difficult problem to solve. However I give Megite tons of kudos for trying.

Greg, correct me if I'm wrong - but isn't clustering stories involve a whole lot more computation work than 'simply' doing personalization? I don't mean to say what Findory does isn't complicated, just that I understood that clustering is a lot harder to scale...

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Greg Linden — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:27:10 -0000

Nik, you said, "it does not scale, you can not compute a mini-blogosphere relevance rank for each user and hope that you can scale that."

That's exactly what Findory does, Nik. If you know what you're doing, you can make it scale. According to Alexa, Findory has about the same traffic as Memeorandum.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Gabe — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 16:15:49 -0000

I agree with Nik that there's a huge technical chasm to cross before a "personalized meme tracker" gets really useful. I think progress I make on the memeorandum engine is approaching that, but it's still far off enough that I'll pass on hyping it for now.

Richard, I think Nik's comments are valid even for a pre-beta product, especially given the likely difficulty in delivering what's promised.

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Nik Cubrilovic — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 15:19:46 -0000

Robert: you have 857 feeds and at the moment the relevance rating seems to be only 'most recent' - if you keep clicking through that list you will see *Every* post.

That was my whole point about relevance ranking - it is much harder when you have 10-100 sources. Even with thousands of sources, memeorandum gets very boring in quiet times. The blogosphere is not as big as we think it is, especially when our only measure of relevance is links.

Mathew memeorandum lets you take part in those popular conversations so your thoughts can be aired. I guess if people find what you say to be worthwhile they might hang around your blog or subscribe etc.

Showing a top-level view of what is good in your subscriptions is a job for your aggregator - and having worked on this problem in the past I can tell you that it is not easy for a few reasons. The first is because of the lack of links in general, relevance needs to be more than that. Second is that it does not scale, you can not compute a mini-blogosphere relevance rank for each user and hope that you can scale that.. it's why you don't have personalised google results :) but kudos to the guys tackling problem, just be aware that it is a well-worn path

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

Mathew Ingram — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 15:05:37 -0000

Jaseone, you just put your finger on a much larger question that the whole blogosphere is wrestling with (or should be at least). If all anyone does is read the top links on memeorandum or digg or megite or tailrank or whatever, then doesn't that just amplify the echo-chamber effect?

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

jaseone — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 14:57:52 -0000

But if everyone only reads articles that are popular then how is an article going to become popular in the first place?

Re: Megite working on personal memetracker

scobleizer — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 14:34:21 -0000

Nik: one HUGE difference. I have thousands of posts come through my aggregator every day (I watch 847 feeds, remember?) This is a much smaller view. It looks like they are doing some link analysis to find popular posts in my group and are not just giving me everything.