As Scoble mentioned earlier today, the developers of Megite, a memetracker, have developed a personal version of Megite which tracks only those memes in your feed list. Here’s the special edition based on my feed list.

Read/WriteWeb also has a story on this.

The developers note that this service is in the experimental stage and is not generally available. Having said that, this sort of thing has huge potential. After less than a day, I find myself going to my personal Megite page more than Bloglines.

Memeorandum remains the King of the Memetrackers, but this may have pushed Megite well into second place.

Technorati Tags:
megite, rss

Mike Arrington previews 3Bubbles, an Ajax based application that will let bloggers add chatrooms to each of their posts.

While I’m impressed with the technology, I tend to agree with Kai Turner, who had this to say in a comment:

I wonder how many sites (aside from your top 100 blogs) can sustain a chatroom for a single post, let alone an entire site?

The answer is exactly none of them. In fact, other than Mike’s site and maybe Boing Boing, I’m not sure how many of the top 100 blogs could sustain one. I can tell you from experience with ACCBoards.Com and other very popular sites I have developed that it takes a boatload of traffic to sustain a chat room. More than a truckload. And all that traffic has to arrive at roughly the same time.

Kai correctly points out that to have traction in a chat room you have to schedule chats. And there are other services that do that now. Why do we need a chat room for every post (sing that to the tune of a Beach Boys song).

The other problem with a chat room for every post (again, sing it like a Beach Boy) is that it will almost certainly reduce the number of comments and other forms of interaction at the blog. Plus, unless there’s some sort of logging feature, chat content isn’t archived the way comments are. And even if it is the noise to content ratio in a chat room is about the same as my links to Mike are to Mike’s link to me (much of the former; little of the latter).

Mike mentions in a responsive comment that it would be cool to have him and some of the developers hang out backstage in a chat room after a big TechCrunch review and answer questions from the unwashed masses. Actually, I agree that it would be nice to have a chat like that, but unless we’re going to hang out by the backstage door those chats would need to be scheduled. Plus some smart company will have to invent cyber-autographs we can get once we get inside.

Again, I think this is neat technology. But sometimes people confuse a blue ribbon science project with a business. And like all the stuff I ranted about the other day, the cash in this deal is based largely on advertising.

Blue ribbon, yes. Business, no.

I read an article this morning that Jeeves, the valet that has been the logo for Ask Jeeves since it was founded in 1996, is getting the ax. I remember the brouhaha when Ask Jeeves debuted. The hook was that you could ask a question in plain English. I tried it once and I don’t believe I’ve ever been back.

So I thought I’d go and Ask Jeeves a couple of final questions:

1) Does anybody actually use Ask Jeeves to search the internet?

He responded with three adds at the top of the list for videoprofessor (must be a poker buddy) and two people finder sites (maybe so I can catch up with him at his next gig), and a bunch of stories about his sacking.

So I thought I’d try again.

2) Why would anyone with two brain cells to dangle buy Ask Jeeves in March 2005 for $1.85B?

He responded with three more adds at the top of the list for a market research site, eBay (perhaps that’s where the sale occurred) and some psychology site, and nothing else. Sounds like Jeeves doesn’t want to talk about it.

So Jeeves is toast. The only real question is does anybody care?

One of the hot topics on the internet the last couple of days has been the private beta launch of coComment. coComment allows you to track comments you make on other blogs and display them via a customized page at coComment, a side bar component (like I do with Most Recent Inbound Links on the right side of the main Newsome.Org page) and/or via an RSS feed. The service is free and it looks very promising.

Solution Watch has a very good summary of how it works.

Here’s what I have been doing to track my comments and my initial impressions of coComment.

My Old Plan

Previously I have been bookmarking my comments on other blogs via Delicious with a “mycomments” tag. Here is that page on Delicious. Then I use RSS-to-Javascript to create a java script that I display on my Comments Elsewhere page (Update: no longer in operation). I didn’t think this up. I read about it on A Consuming Experience or Fresh Blog or somewhere similar.

It works pretty well, though occasionally RSS-to-Javascript is slow or down. But it has been a pretty reliable system so far.

My New Plan

Now I am going to start doing my comment tracking and serving via coComment. There’s not much I can add in the way of an introduction to the service that isn’t covered by the Solution Watch post, but here are my initial impressions. I’m not going to talk about bugs and whatnot, since that is the whole purpose of beta testing and I’ll post those reports in the coComment beta forum. But here are my initial thoughts on the service.

The bookmarklet that you use to integrate your comments into the coComments feed is simple to install (at least in Firefox) and very unobtrusive. It only requires a single click before posting a comment to another blog and a little icon appears in the comment box to indicate that you’re good to go. All in all, the commenting process is the same as it was before, with only a single additional click required. This should solve one of the concerns Mike Arrington had yesterday about using a third party service for commenting. It’s much more like Delicious in this regard than it is a third party central commenting platform (which is a good thing).

So the comment tracking seems to be very well implemented and easy to set up and use.

The side bar comments serving is also an improvement over my current approach. I have not added that content to the main Newsome.Org page yet, but I have been testing it on a separate page. I don’t know if I’ll add it to the main page or not, but at a minimum I’ll reconfigure my My Comments Elsewhere page to use coComment.

The most promising feature is the RSS feed of your comments. I am still playing around with this feature and will talk about it more in my next coComment article.

Current Conclusions

A very promising service. Wonder if they can figure out a way to do the same thing with inbound comments?

Mike Arrington (who will one day link to Newsome.Org, even if he doesn’t know it yet) has a post today about the various real-time news aggregators who are racing to be the next Memeorandum. Some of them I knew about, some of them I didn’t. I’m going to take a real-time look at each and see what I think.

Memeorandum

Do I Love It: Madly. I’ve talked a ton about Memeorandum, so there’s not much more I can say. It is the New York Times of the blogosphere and the first site I read every morning.

Does It Love Me: Most of the time. Many of my posts show up there. There have been periods in the past where they don’t for a while. But I have defended it as one of the most equal opportunity sites in the blogosphere and I will continue to do so.

Conclusion: The undisputed king of the hill.

Megite

Do I Love It: We just met, but so far I’m pretty infatuated. I like the interface a lot, even though it is not as eloquent at Memeorandum’s. I’ve found a lot of good stuff here. One of my daily reads.

Does It Love Me: So far. Many of my posts show up there.

Conclusion: Definitely has legs and will be a major player in the aggregation and content mining game.

Chuquet

Do I Love It: Pretty much, though it is a work in progress. I mentioned it the other day. It seems to have a broader focus (but not too broad), which gives me links to stories I don’t always see elsewhere. I like the Flickr Wall.

Does It Love Me: So far. Some, but not all, of my applicable posts show up there.

Conclusion: A work in progress, but very promising.

Technorati Kitchen

Do I Love It: Well, as a self-proclaimed customer evangelist for Technorati, I better say yes. The truth is that I like it OK, but I don’t use it nearly as much as I do some of the others. Plus, it seems a little heavy on the A-Listers, which may mean that it’s solely link driven.

Does It Love Me: I don’t know. I’ve never seen one of my posts there, but I haven’t looked all that much.

Conclusion: I like it, but I don’t love it.

Tailrank

Do I Love It: I’m starting to have feelings for it. I like its straight forward interface, more than Chuquet’s but a little less than Megite’s. I read it every day, so it must be doing something right.

Does It Love Me: At first it hated me, now it’s starting to like me a little. Some, but not nearly all, my posts show up there. Hopefully, we’re going to start going steady soon.

Conclusion: Part of the Big Three princes in Memeorandum’s kingdom, along with Megite and Chuquet.

Blogniscient

Do I Love It: I don’t know. It seems extremely weighted toward the “Top 100” blogs. I didn’t see any links there I haven’t seen elsewhere already today. Maybe this is designed as a way for new blog readers to find the most popular blogs. I do like the page design a lot. I just don’t know how inclusive it is.

Does It Love Me: I don’t know. I can’t see any way to view the archives or to search the site. My hunch is that it doesn’t love me.

Conclusion: Seems like it might be a closed system to me, but I can’t be sure. Requires further study.

Blogrunner

Do I Love It: Sort of, but it’s more of a straight news site and I get that sort of news elsewhere. I can see the attraction for someone more news-interested, though. The sub-pages are too busy.

Does It Love Me: Almost certainly not.

Conclusion: Good execution, but less interesting to me than many of the others.

Blogsnow

Do I Love It: Not really. It’s simple interface would be good for mobile users.

Does It Love Me: Sadly, no. There are posts that link to me in the list, but none of mine.

Conclusion: I’m impressed that someone could create this, but I get most of this content already elsewhere.

Topix.Net

Do I Love It: Not really. It’s a part of a larger content aggregation page and it has blogs on all topics in a single category. Too broad for me.

Does It Love Me: I don’t know. Probably not.

Conclusion: Not a true blog aggregator by my definition.

On Deck

Newroo and Tinfinger (launching soon). I’ll write about them once I have the chance to check them out. Beta invites welcome.

Don Dodge has a very interesting interview with Gabe Rivera, the creator of Memeorandum.

In the interview, Gabe talks about the creation of Memeorandum and addresses several of the issues I talked about the other day when defending Memeorandum from what I felt was undue criticism.

Memeorandum is not perfect, but it is the place to start if you want to know and read about the hottest tech topics of the day.

Laurence Timms sent me a comment the other day about his project, Chuquet, which looks like a great new resource in my never ending search for good blogs to read.

Memeorandum is the king of the content finders for me and the first site I read every day, but Chuquet’s straight forward design and its Flickr Wall has earned it a place on my daily reading list.

I am constantly looking for good blogs to read and write about here, so Chuquet is a welcome addition to my content finding tools.

Check it out. I bet you’ll bookmark it too.

We’ve been kicking around the boom, bubble or bust thing for the past few days, and just when I started to believe that we had not actually forgotten the hard lessons we learned from the last bubble and bust, I read this article in the NY Times. If there was one perfect example of the bubble mentality of the late nineties, it is the story of Blue Mountain and the E-Card.

Here’s the part of that article that matters most:

Excite@Home, the ill-fated online portal and high-speed Internet service, bought Blue Mountain for $780 million in 1999, partly for its ability to give advertisers a way to reach a wide swath of the Internet audience. Excite sold Blue Mountain two years later for $35 million to American Greetings….

If we truly see a resurgence of E-Cards, then we know the dirty bubble is lurking somewhere. I realize that an E-Card in and of itself does not create a bubble, but the mere fact that E-Cards are mentioned in a major newspaper is a bad omen that should send us running for the hills.

Technorati Tags:
bubble, e-cards