The Tech Baggers & Wanting Something Better But Quieter

Saturday, May 15th, 2010 | Uncategorized

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As always, Louis Gray very eloquently said tonight “It’s Time to Stand for Something Better (Again)“. Things have gotten a little vicious as of late because some very sensitive issues have arise and I admit I’ve been caught up in the emotions. Yes at some point the mob needs to die, I’m not sure if we are there yet but it’s always good to reflect on your role in the picture. The sad thing is, we’re not talking about technology these days, we’re talking about philosophies, politics and religion of technology companies and their users. Now these are all important things to talk & debate about but they do tend to lean towards the negative writings after a while and mud gets thrown very heavy from all sides. We’ve essentially have become “The Tech Baggers” (Hey, Tech people drink coffee not Tea), not something I’m proud of when you put it into that type of perspective.

But we really want to be talking about technology and it’s better future. The issues we are talking about today really do define the tomorrow. But we need to be reminded sometimes that it should really be done with respect and civil. That of course goes in hand with respect over breaking news first. There are lines that should not be crossed even if you have something to prematurely break.

An Echo Filter and Ranker

But finally, I did want to touch upon “the echo effect”. We all want to say our piece on current topics and honestly, there isn’t that much news on a daily basis. Yet every day I easily have 1500 new RSS feed entries which has a lot of overlap. Some of this issue is too many voices but this is something that I know technology can fix for us. We need ways to reduce the Echos to our individual eyes. Between Feeds, RTs, Shares and Ranking Systems there needs to be a way that you can group topics and echos together while choosing to expand the grouping out if you really want to read every article. I kind of want Robert Scoble’s curation dream or at least the early building block of that system. This isn’t Lazyfeed or anything that exists today that I am aware of, this is something like Google Reader and Seesmic with much smarter ways of auto-grouping topics with sub-topics and knowing which ones give me all the news information I need at the top and which ones are opinion. AND it gets smarter by the reader’s actions understanding what and who the reader feels gives them the most signal. If I subscribe to an RSS feed, remove those RTs of who I’m following and use those as ranking Likes instead. I don’t know what this fully looks like and I know this is no easy task but it’s needed badly.

Jean Friesewinkel

Mark, I fully believe technology can solve this "echo" issue (it's a big one for me as well). We are not there yet, but I'm sure we will be :-)

Couple of things you should check out:
- Have you checked out Cadmus (http://thecadmus.com/) which intelligently groups tweets? I find it a great way to make sure I didn't miss anything big on Twitter; it works pretty well for time scopes under 2-3 days
- Similarly Google Reader has partly solved this by "accumulating" the shares of everyone I follow on one RSS item (works unless the permalinks are different e.g. due to Feedburner)
- Finally I'm very interested if anyone has tried or seen an implementation of Google's Living Stories topic-based aggregator on a Wordpress back-end (http://googlenewsblog.blogspot....
Mark Essel

Good read Mark. Civility is all well and good, as long as that doesn't impede our perspective. I think it's necessary when companies go off track to have a vocal group of fans/critics raking over the nuances of what's the heart of the matter.

The curation tool is proving challenging, how best to pull the parts and streams together doesn't have a single solution. The design requires hard choices that will alienate some and hopefully provide value to a few as well.

As to filters, our best bet for now is to choose a handful of sources and let our intelligent friends observe and share their perspetives. I haven't found a better answer to "super human filters" (or mortal portals- another nickel to LG), which I blogged about last year.

Here's my simple reply to you and Louis. It's not x but how you y
AlexSchleber

Agreed on the curation.

Have to disagree on the Facebook stuff as you might have suspected: Calling out Zuck on his land grab and convenient (for him) anti-privacy "stance", I see as my duty as a good "netizen". We've seen all of this before with Microsoft and the browser wars.

Doesn't make me feel any better that they may be standing behind this too by way of funding. Wouldn't be the first time that Microsoft is fighting a proxy war, remember how they knee-capped LINUX by way of the SCO/Darl McBride?
manielse

Oh, don't get me wrong, I still disagree with Facebook and believe Zuckerberg is a major liability in regards to image and trust. But Louis's article was one of being a Father-figure of Bloggers, we need to be influencers of why we believe in something but not a vicious mob that is name calling (even though I just simply reversed Zuckerberg's words on to him).

The Tech Baggers & Wanting Something Better But Quieter

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