More on smart aggregators
March 1st, 2004Bruce Williams seems interested in a “smart aggregator”, like I discussed the others day. He writes:
“What I’d like to be able to do is tell my aggregator (currently NewsGator), that “I like this entry – thumbs up on the feed”; or “this entry doesn’t interest me – thumbs down”. The aggregator could keep a running tally of thumbs for each subscription, (and here is the best part) it could then sort the feeds by ranking. Subscriptions that have historically been the most interesting to me would be at the top, and the others at the bottom.
“This would also make it easier to trim my blogroll; I could just start at the bottom of the list and ask myself if I really want to continue each of those subscriptions.”
I believe this to be a feature that will soon appear in the next generation aggregation software. We, as humans, collect (librarians especially collect) rather than purge. While it may not be in our nature to get rid of stuff (how many mailing lists are you on, whose content you don’t read - when you see it in your inbox, you delete these messages without even looking at it), aggregators can hopefully be built, to quote a famous Baltimore library director Charles Robinson, to “give us what we want”, despite our premonition to collect what isn’t useful. Aggregators can be our weeders, our filters, our librarians.