---
title: "Syndicating Whuffie"
date: 2003-07-02T12:55:12-04:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2003/07/02/syndicated-whuffie/
author: Les Orchard
---
# Syndicating Whuffie
... there's excellent knowledge in blogs if only we had the tools to extract it.
What sort of tools? Relevance and reputation based feeds and
aggregators for one. The problem of quickly finding what's good from
among the great muck of the blogosphere is, if you ask me, a far more
urgent problem than seeing the correct authorship or harmonizing
dc:date and pubDate before I even read the thing.
... facilitate P2P trading of RSS from desktop to desktop as well as
server to desktop -- you subscribe to 1000 feeds, aggregate them, rate
them (explicitly or by statistical filtering based on past use
patterns) and then rebroadcast your new rated feed. Aggregators could
then /use/ redundant items from feedback loops because each RSS source
has a reputation rating that weights the contained individual item
ranking; repeated items add their rankings.
Yes. This is it. This is what I want to see come next from aggregators
and blogs and syndication and all this mess. It's what I've been tinkering
with in small steps for most of a year. It's what I intend BookmarkBlogger
to facilitate, as well as AmphetaOutlines and the homebrew aggregator I'm
hacking around with right now.
At first thought, I'm not sure whether or not building and
republishing RSS (or Echo) feeds is where it's at. But, the more I think
about it, the more it seems perfectly elegant to me. All the elements are
there, except for an extension to capture ratings. Extend aggregators to
consume these rating-enriched feeds, and instead of just spooling the items
up into your view, extract and assimilate the ratings into a growing
matrix of rater versus rated. Apply all the various algorithms to
correlate your rating history with that of others to whose ratings you
subscribe. Mix in a little Bayes along with other machine learning.
As for the interface... well, that's a toughie. At present, I think I could
sneak ratings into my daily routine by monitoring my BookmarkBlogger use and
watching the disclosure triangle clicks and link visits in my AmphetaOutlines
based news aggregator. I could easily see adding an iTunes-like 5-star
rating interface, but unless I get some pretty significant payoff from
painstakingly rating things, I'll never use it. At least in iTunes, I get
to have playlists of my faves automatically jumbled together, if I remember
to use the ratings in the moment.
The cool thing will be when sites like
Technorati and Feedster start
using these ratings, but the even cooler thing is when all that's on
my desktop. This could be easy, though, couldn't it? What do we call
it, Syndicated Whuffie?
(Which reminds me: Eventually, we really gotta get back to the subscription
problem. All these agents polling files everywhere will get to be nasty.
Obviously. This has been talked about already, but little has happened.
We need some ?PubSub, maybe some caches and concentrators. All stuff that's
been mentioned in passing before, and left by the wayside as unsexy.)
shortname=syndicated_whuffie
Archived Comments