:: Have you heard about this item you brought to my attention? ::

Thursday, February 26, 2004

I wrote a little while back about memigo, which tailors news to your tastes based on your browsing habits. One of its great features is that anyone can register their syndication feed (RSS/Atom/WhatHaveYou) to be spidered for links to interesting stories. Memigo is nice enough to include attribution so when viewing a summary, one can see from whence it was suggested. Since average bloggers get their feeds scanned just like heavy-hitters like Metafilter and Popdex, I often see "...this article was linked by Drudge Report, Google News, JoeMama, AngieDaddy" or "Memigo user JoeMama originally submitted this article" at the bottom. When they say a user has "submitted" an article, it can sometimes (well, in my experience, almost always) mean that their feed was scanned and a nice ripe link was harvested. Memigo has a very tacit definition of submitted. It's like the teacher that signed you up for Model U.N. because he/she saw you reading a short pamphlet on Truman (or Model League of Nations because you were staring wistfully at a crochet quilt featuring Woodrow Wilson).

So memigo scans its huge database of feeds and presents me with news items which it thinks I might find interesting. It does an decent job - not good enough to wholly supplant other news sources but spiffy as a supplement. But: since I've included my blog's feed (those cute little syndication links over in the sidebar aren't just there for show) in memigo's resource pool, anything about which I post is fair game, and there tends to be a high degree of crossover between the subjects about which I read (i.e. memigo thinks I like) and the subjects about which I blog. The end result is that, on occasion, I'll be browsing through the list of suggested headlines only to find one that looks strangely familiar. Upon reading a summary, I'll see why: "Memigo user morland originally submitted this article."

All that processing just to prove the near-tautology that I am interested in what I post about. It is nice though to see proof that my browsing tastes (from which memigo gleans what to suggest) and my linking behavior are fairly consonant.

Now back to crochet. Oh Wodrow... If only memigo user cupid would suggest our love.

Posted by morland @ 01:29 AM

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