The RSS Clutter

There's a fair amount of news out there. I use Google Reader to capture it all; however, it still can't make sense of the noise.

News and events are viral; they disseminate quickly throughout the internet. Take for example what happened today. Google accidentally labeled the whole internet as malware. Below every search result there was a nice warning: "This site may harm your computer." Even Google.com was labeled harmful. Interesting mistake.

While the dust settled and Google fixed the glitch, everyone blogged about it. Everyone. No everyone. I looked at Google News and there are 407 articles from 89 sources about the story.

As I went through my Google Reader articles for the day I heard about it at least 5 times. Makes sense, I follow tech blogs. But we can do better. A nice feature for Google Reader would be analyzing the content of my unread items and showing the unread articles by story. A way for it to say, "this article about Google malware is similar to these four; look at all of them now." Or one step further, look at your unread item by category: iPhone, Kindle, Google, etc...

This is hard; language is complcated. The fortunate part is that we know much more about the articles then what they say. We know when they were published, what sites and press releases they link to, the main subject (the tags), and the source. These content clues along with learning from the users - allowing them to teach the computer and say "Yes they're similar." or "No they're not" - you could build a very good content grouping engine.

Google News does it on a larger scale with the "All news and articles" link below each result. Let's try and leverage that for Google Reader.

Google and Search

About three weeks ago, I installed Google Analytics this blog. I installed it just to test out it's features - map overlay, length on site, or referring sources - but the tool has been so impressive that I've found uses for it. The biggest trend that I've noticed is just the obvious - the more I update the blog the more hits I get. I'm surprised by the hits I get; not many (a few a day), but on average that is more than the one or two people I expected.

I was conscious that people read this site and its a public site, but Google Analytics helped me realized it. Now I've added every analysis tool I can find for fun and in an attempt to improve my posts - feedburner comes highly recommended - and here's what I've found:

-On Saturday, I mentioned the Newseum and then I received three hits from the Newseum related Freedom Forum. So someone there must be watching the blogs for mentions of Newseum. In case they're wondering, the Newseum was incredibly well put together; I felt like I was in a news room saturated with media, and it was great to be reminded how the media influences and encompasses all aspects of our lives. They had an exhibit on emerging media that included some blog short films. The building stands boldly along Pennsylvania Ave amongst the Smithsonian Museums, and it's a welcome addition. I recommend it.

-Most of my friends have an internet connection from Comcast or Lawrence and own Macs and Jacob still uses Opera.

-Readers are repeat visitors, so I'm going to try to update more often. Thanks for reading.

I've added a new section, Subscribe!, with links to make it easier to add my blog to an RSS Reader.