Bill Kearney wrote:
Ok I at least see your point ... your operating on different assumption than am I ... so at first I couldn't even see what your were saying. I'm assuming that there are a group of feeds that you always read ... your friends, your business associates, your personal network, people who have given you reliable or interesting information in the past. You will probably want to read every item in those feeds .. or at least be presented with every item. But if you rely on that as your only source of items, you will miss too much. That is where keyword filtering comes into play. You apply the filters to the *entire river* of information to discover new sources.The trouble with filtering is you end up missing quite a lot. It's one thing to want to apply a search filter against a pool of feed items. It's another thing to expect it to be able to exclude data.I have no idea you this mean by saying that. If I have a river of items flowing in a group of feeds, and I can't read all the items because there are too many, then what better way is there than to specify keywords to exclude all the items which do not contain them ? Now I don't know if that was what Ryan originally wanted, but it's sure what I want.The trouble is keyword logic doesn't often adequately detect what you /mean/ not what you've told it. That and while you might consider items using some keywords others might not use them. It becomes this endless list of keywords and cross-references. Then it falls prey to the stupid "metadata won't work" fallacies. I certainly use filters as a searching tool but not as something that blocks items from view by default.
But that assumes that it is practical to store all items flowing in many-many feeds in a database. What happens when instead of 200,000 feeds we are dealing with 200,000,000 feeds or even 200,000,000,000 feeds. If the AOLs and the MSNs get the knack of RSS , then we got to think of how this is going to scale way way beyond where we are today.That's, frankly, bullshit. That;s just another rendition of the old "it'll never scale" argument. Please. So nothing should be tried in the interim? Right now the run rate of feeds isn't approaching anywhere near the numbersyou're suggesting.
Oh really ? Can you read all the items in all the feeds in one day ?
If you store all the items from all the feeds that you have discovered (regardless of whether those feeds have ever contained an item that interests you) just how big and how fast will that database grow? You are one of the few people in the world that I think could actually give us a reasonably accurate answer to that question.Yes, it's certainly possible that more people will start sites. Most won't stick to it so it's not like it'd matter. As for resources available, in the days of 200gb drives and 3gHz processors that hardly has any bearing whatsoever.
I agree, but that assumes that you have already built up such a network. Many people have not, or are in the process of switching from one network to another. How are they to *rapidly* get oriented in a new network ?What am i missing ?There's a whole other aspect of peer coalition building. It's one thing to try to use automated tools to filter your way to nirvanna. It's perhaps more useful to participate in peer relationships with likeminded people and use that network as a guiding tool toward items of relevance. Not as filters. There's often value hidden in that noise. It's a tremendously bad idea to think that filtering yourself away from it will help you become better informed.
Seth Russell http://radio.weblogs.com/0113759/