Filtering RSS Through Your Social Web

museumpeace writes "Cory Lok assesses the methods, competition and prospects of Rojo, a venture-funded startup RSS aggregator. The brief article is interesting to me because it tries to explain how this and similar uses of a social network harnessed by web search techniques can perform relevance-tuning that will save me from drowning in the tidal wave of blogged newsbits that I find so addicting. They are using a viral marketing approach of spreading membership by invitations from existing members."

The Eric Cartman marketing method

[The I Shing]

I'm inviting everyone to join my social network... except for YOU GUYS! Nah nah nah nah nah nah!

A quick check of google

[madro]

Found this entry:
The Semantic Social Network [downes.ca]

I've been thinking about this for a while. I'm not sold on the concept of belonging to a social network site. There was a time when people registered their web sites on directories like Yahoo, until Google figured out a way to spider the web and present relevant stuff to you without requiring pre-registration. I'm not sure requiring membership with a site is going to work, without some sort of protocol to let different sites work with each other.

Eventually, everyone will have their own blogs, and will embed some identity info into them. We're seeing the semantic web emerging from what people want to do on the web instead of from people trying to classify everything.

Now an interesting issue is balancing anonymity with community. What would be neat to see would be ways of embedding different types of content in your blog and giving each type different accessibility levels. You'd have your deep thoughts available to the public, but still be able to share stories about your kids with your inner circle.

RSS, Friend-of-a-friend, cryptography, semantics ... roll 'em all up and let's see what happens.

My views

[Woogiemonger]

When I get together with friends and family, having an idea about what's on their mind and what interests them would help make conversation more enriching. We'd both have had time to comtemplate and form opinions on similar topics. If this overcame the bad vibes of a spam-based marketing scheme (hence me refusing the social network invite), it could really augment the mutual intuition two human beings have of each others' thoughts.

Sorry, I don't buy it.

[iJames]

They're my friends. That doesn't mean they share all my interests, or even most of them. That doesn't mean they'll care about any of the blogs I read, or that I even want them to know that I found that article about gerbil spanking particularly interesting. And how does Rojo handle it if I want one subset of people to know that I'm into gerbil spanking and not another group?

If I want people to know about something, I'll send them a link or put it on my own blog. Making it happen automatically would only incline me to be very self-conscious about my casual browsing habits on this "social" network. I don't always want to be that social.

Re:RSS difference

[Anonymous Coward]

Some sites don't tell Firefox that they support Live Bookmarks, even though they actually do. If you know the URL of a site's RSS feed (url ends with .rdf or .xml), you can manually create a Live Bookmark for the site. Go to the Bookmarks menu and select 'Manage Bookmarks'. Under the 'File Menu', select 'New Live Bookmark'. Create a name for the Live Bookmark and add the URL. New articles from that site will appear as Live Bookmarks in Firefox.
a la Firefox help. RTFM