I’m back on my automated ways to find new and interesting people
kick, ala Google Neighborhood, only this time I’m using data from Phil Pearson’s Blogging Ecosystem. By looking at the sites I currently read in my homegrown news aggregator, looking them up in the blogging ecosystem and seeing which sites they link to, weighing them slightly by popularity (based on the natural log of their incoming links) but also dividing by the number of other sites they link to (because a midlist site that only links to a handful of people is more relevant than a popular site that links to 100), and filtering out sites that don’t have RSS feeds (plus a few I already know I don’t want to read), I came up with a list of recommended new reading.
I’ve checked out these sites and manually added a few of them to my subscription list. But starting tomorrow, and once a week until I run out of interesting people to read, my news aggregator will automatically subscribe me to the top recommended site I’m not reading. I’ll give myself a week to try it out. If I don’t like it, I’ll add it to my ignore list so it doesn’t keep popping up again. Of course, if I keep it, it will subtly affect the next week’s recommendation.
This feature, incidentally, is the #2 reason I wrote my own news aggregator. (#1 was the ability to get my news by email, since I’m on the road all the time and can’t be tied to one PC.) I didn’t codename it New Door
for nothing; it just took a while for it to live up to its name.
I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find that extremely comforting, that we’re so close, but I also find it like Chinese water torture that we’re so close because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It’s not just big names — it’s anyone. A native in a rain forest, a Tiero del Fuegan, an Eskimo. I am bound — you are bound — to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It’s a profound thought — how Paul found us, how to find the man whose son he claims to be, or perhaps is, although I doubt it. How everyone is a new door, opening into other worlds.
Ouisa Kittredge, Six Degrees of Separation
An interactive version of this program (minus the RSS locator) is available at diveintomark.org/newdoor/. Feel free to try it on your own home page or links page. Following Amazon.com’s model of recommendation shopping, I added already reading
and not interested
links, so you can fine-tune your recommendations on the spot.
newdoor-1.0.tgz, GPL-licensed. More details at the Recommended Reading project page. Track updates to this project by subscribing to the Recommended Reading RSS feed. Infrastructure, infrastructure, sis boom bah…
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© 2001–9 Mark Pilgrim