Heri

I get my news nowdays mostly from blogs RSS subscriptions. These blogs are around my centers of interests, and prove in the past to provide valuable insights. I also visit some time to time news from Hacker News or general websites like lemonde.fr.
I found out that those were valuable websites that filter the digital noise on the Internet, and allows me to keep-up-to-date with what’s important and meaningful for me.

The thing though is that it does not take into account serendipity, and of course I find myself overlooking some piece of news that were not reported in these selected news feed. And I find myself looking for a tool that would get all important news, but would also feature from some time to time a page or a post which might not be a high-profile blogger, but who would bring up a new idea or something meaningful.

Techmeme is known to sort technology blog posts, especially the startups/web2.0 “stuff”, and does a good job in doing so. From what I know, it features on its homepage new items that gets lots of trackbacks or mentions in other blogs, a sort of social validation much alike Google’s Pagerank algorithm. I also noticed it also takes into account keywords used in the headline.

Techmeme is an interesting project, although in my opinion, it encourages “memes”, and I’ve seen many posts that were just paraphrasing a featured blog post. It’s also a firehose of information, and you will see yourself loose a lot of time if you decide to take your technology news from that website. And as I said, there is no serendipity or “small blogs” in techmeme.

I’ve been thinking about this, and there are some tools avalaible out there (AideRSS or Technorati‘s API come to my mind), I’ve done a quick architecture of the whole thing, and it seems trivial to create a blog aggregator that would do what I describe. And I thought it would be great to do a Québec-theme blog aggregator, or one around Madagascar.

Of course, this is just an idea stage. I know it’s technically feasible, I only need to find the time. And yes, get a web server. But yes, finish those other ruby on rails projects. But in a time where everyone and their pet has a blog and is media, I think this would be a tool that many would use.