Sunday, September 12, 2004

Foo Camp on web feeds

Folks at Foo Camp are discussing next-generation weblog readers:
    Building the Next-Gen Feed Reader

    Modern feedreaders work well with 10 or 50 feeds, but fail to be useful at 300+ feeds. Skimming feeds are difficult, and any intelligent sorting and filtering is practically non-existent. Bayesian filtering, adaptive sorting, link aggregation and popularity (your own personal Blogdex!), feed ranking, and internal statistics are all interesting angles.

    Let's talk about building a microcontent browser that can scale to 1000 feeds and beyond.
Seems like they haven't seen Blogory yet. Blogory solves exactly this problem, managing thousands of feeds with adaptive sorting and filtering. It uses personalization to helps readers find focus in the overwhelming glut of information. It is the next generation of feed readers.

There's also a session on weblog search:
    Weblog Search Engines

    Technorati, Feedster, Bloglines, Blogdex and MSN BlogBot are all competing for the blog search space, not to mention the popularity trackers like Blogdex, Daypop and Popdex. What are they doing well, and what could be improved? What features are they ignoring entirely? Will Google step in at the last minute and kick everyone's ass?
See also my earlier post saying that, yes, Google (and Yahoo) will come in and kick everyone's ass. It's not just that Google and Yahoo are bigger. It's that the current small players have scaling trouble and other quality problems, providing an opportunity for the big guys.

There's several other interesting sessions as well on topics such as machine learning, web services, internet advertising, and security. Sounds like a good time.

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