It's Rishi

Danny Sullivan interviews Gabe Rivera – Gabe is the creator of memeorandum.com/TechMeme, one of the premier blog/news aggregators on the Web. Ever since I first found memeorandum a couple years ago, I have been a multiple-times-per-day reader. My routine is: open laptop, check e-mail, check RSS reader, check TechMeme. You may also notice that Memeorandum is the only company besides Google and Yahoo that has its own tag on my blog! It’s indispensable for me. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet Gabe at various geek social events and he’s always struck me as someone who is purely focused on methodically building the perfect product. He keeps a low-profile and is easy to approach. On more than one occcasion I’ve rambled off my ideas for to him and he’s always been kind enough not to interrupt and beg me to stop boring him. =)

The second interview worth reading today is TorrentFreak’s interview of Bram Cohen, the creator of BitTorrent, the now ubiquitous P2P file distribution protocol, and the founder of BitTorrent, Inc (recently in the news for purchasing popular BitTorrent client, uTorrent). If you are a frequent torrent user, you owe it to yourself to learn more from the man who brought about the current revolution of P2P file-sharing.

It’s approaching 3AM right now and I’m not asleep. In fact, over the past year, my sleeping time has gotten later and later and later. Why you ask? Partly it’s because I’ve been busy working on my startup Dontbuyjunk and I’m often working late into the night until I’m satisfied with the progress that I’ve made for the day. But, I’m increasingly finding that what really is preventing me from getting to bed is information overload courtesy of the Internet. Let me explain.

I’ve been spending hours per day on the Internet for several years now. The big difference though is that recently the time I spend is shifting away from entertainment (mindless chatting on message boards, gaming, etc.) to information exchange activities such as reading/writing in the blogosphere. Every night, after I’m done working, I do one last catch up with my RSS reader and almost without fail, I end up spending a couple hours bouncing from one blog to the next and then to aggregators like del.icio.us and memeorandum.

Today, publishing (via the Web) is essentially free. And when I say “free” I mean that it both has no cost and is without rules or barriers. Furthermore, the second you publish your content, it is instantly accessible to a billion people. Because of all this, the rate at which information id created and disseminated is astonishing. So this is a good thing right?

Well…sure. enabling people to express and share both knowledge and opinions is great for society in countless ways. The problem that develops is that with so much publishing going on, how can I keep track of that tiny subset of information that is relevant, unique (remember that the majority of content published everyday is either syndication or basically duplicate) and valuable in my world? It’s getting harder by the day. Further exacerbating my problem is the wanting to not just read the facts behind a topic/news bit, but also read the opinions and participate in the many insightful discussions that branch from it.

So what’s the solution to my problem? Lunesta? Maybe. The next-generation of aggregators? Bingo.
One big trend that we are starting to see develop and I believe will be a major area of focus in the years to come is in information filtering and aggregation. Search engines like Google and centralized information sources like ESPN and Wikipedia allow me to pull in specific pieces of information when I am actively seeking it. However, their limitation stems from the fact that most of the information I absorb on a daily basis is new and could not have been searched for. In other words, if I didn’t know the information existed, how could I have searched for it? Instead, I must rely on my set of trusted sources to push this new information to me. Information aggregations, either human-derived (digg, reddit, del.icio.us) or algorithmic (memeorandum, blogniscient, Google News), are a step in the right direction. But aggregators have a long way to go before they truly are accurate and encompassing tools for information.

Anyways, it’s now 4:30AM and I’m basically just blabbing. Aggregators is an area that I’m becoming increasingly interested in myself and I have some of my own ideas brewing in my head about what the perfect aggregator would be and how it would work. I’ll be thinking and blogging about it in the coming weeks.

For some more discussions on aggregators, check out a blog post on memeorandum I was reading earlier that I found insightful:

http://mashable.com/2005/11/08/hacking-memeorandum-more-proof-that-algorithms-dont-work/

Be sure to read the comments thread.