Betsy Devine: Funny ha-ha and/or funny peculiar

Are you worn down by competitors who claim to:

• e-enable plug-and-play e-commerce
• optimize killer interfaces
• seize intuitive synergies
• revolutionize bleeding-edge channels
• scale sticky networks

Hah! Now you can make all these claims and more, just by clicking a button at the Web Bullshit Generator

I’m glad W-BS-G is not on the list of Bloggies finalists up against Feedster. (Subtle hint there.)

Don’t forget, people who vote for Feedster are displaying the kind of good taste and general loveableness that cause the world’s karma engines to shower them with admiring fans of both sexes, charismatic smiles, a parking place right where you want it, and all those other things you’ve only seen hinted at by high-priced TV commercials.

Take that, W-BS-G!

(Thanks to Steve Pomeroy of StaticFree for the Del.icio.us link to the Bullshit button.)

Orkut debuted Thursday and decamped Sunday. Oh well….

They got lots of whuffie in between.

As Susan Mernit points out, more than 1,000 hits for Orkut in a Feedster search.

In related news, David Weinberger claims that “orkut” is the Finnish word for “orgasm.”

People who invested a lot of time in making themselves a nice home page over at Orkut are hoping this one will turn out to be multiple.

Can you believe it?

Feedster, the little RSS-search engine that could, is up for a Bloggie Award at sxsw!!!

Category: Best web application for weblogs.

List of Finalists: Blogrolling.com, Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger….and Feedster.

Yep. Pretty darn cool! That’s my little company (ok, not totally mine, but the one I work for and love) up there with the big guys! Woo hoo! Woot! And other cries of pleasure….

Hey, join the fun–head over to the Bloggies 2004. Easy links let you check out finalists who include some of the best blogs and metablogs on the globe.

And, while you’re over there, plllleeeeeeez vote for Feedster!!!

Please vote for Feedster!

You know something you want is somewhere in RSS*–but how the heck do you find it?

The blogroll model picked up by aggregators is what I call “friend-centered.” You tell the aggregator who your friends are, and it tells you when somebody on your list posts.

The Feedster** model is what I call “topic-centered.” You search for a word or phrase that interests you, and Feedster returns any posts that include your topic–often posts made within the past few minutes.

Both models are useful. Most of us have friends as well as topics of interest! And a lot of people put the two models together by treating their Feedster topic-search as a friend and subscribing to its RSS feed in their aggregator.

Now, thanks to some very hard work by Scott Johnson, you can integrate friends-and-topics in a new way, using Feedster’s new web-based aggregator. (I did some beta-testing on “myFeedster” as it was developed, and I love it.)

The myFeedster aggregator lets you add blogs and newsfeeds to your subscription list directly from the results of a Feedster search. In other words, people who care about the same topics you do can get added easily to your list of friends.

IMO, Feedster just added a very important piece to the RSS-information-finding puzzle.

* RSS (Really Simple Syndication) lets bloggers and newsfolk publish a “feed” to let readers know about updates when they happen. Readers find out that you said something new when (using a friend-centered or a topic-centered method) they’re checking the state of many feeds at once–not two weeks later, when they have leisure time for brower-surfing.

** Feedster is a web-based platform for collecting, searching, managing and delivering RSS content.

At least that’s how I describe it, though I’d probably better quote Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! Finance here–he invented my favorite-ever blog disclaimer: “In case it’s not already obvious, I don’t speak for my employer on my personal web site. Do you know anyone who does?”

Richard of JustAGwailo and Jay at MakeOutCity take issue with my claim that search engines make us smarter. The Internet, they point out, is full of false information that claims to be true.

I completely agree. So, if I don’t believe “the truth is out there,” how can I claim that search engines make us smarter?

One of the great insights of the nineteenth century was the power of numerical data–statistics–to answer questions that once were unanswerable. Statistical questions don’t require “perfect” or infallible data–so long as you can estimate what kinds of errors are likely to arise. Results you can count and numbers you can compare–search engines are great at finding just such answers.

Questions you can’t answer with search engine data: Why are we here? Who wrote Shakespeare’s sonnets? Can anonymous spammers make my package bigger?
Question you can answer with search engine data: Who gets more play in online news media–Dean or Kerry? (Last week–Kerry. Rick Heller found he was mentioned almost twice as often as Dean..)

Search engines can also make us smarter by introducing us to websites we wouldn’t otherwise find.

Another smart way I’d love to see Rick Heller using Feedster is for ongoing comparison of candidate weblogs. How much substantive policy talk, how much fundraising talk, how much negative chatter about opponents went on in each weblog this week? Wouldn’t this be a great way to promote a more positive campaign?

So, when I say search engines can make people smarter, I don’t mean that they can answer every question or turn the internet into a perfect place. I just mean that they can help us solve problems, some of them important, that would be very much harder to solve without them.

“Would Mr. Updike [who described a fictional someone as ‘a rich Jew’] describe someone as ‘a rich Catholic’ or ‘a rich Protestant’?”

New York Observer, Nov 26, 2003.

Rhetorical questions don’t really seek information. They assume that nobody can really give an answer–they strongly suggest that we know what the answer would be.

“Happily,” (to quote Timothy Noah’s Slate chatterbox column) “we live in an age when this sort of accusation can be subjected to empirical analysis.”

Noah used the appropriate search engine–in this case, Amazon’s new search-inside-the-book rather than Feedster–to answer the Observer’s no-longer-unanswerable question.

• Noah found no example of Updike’s using “rich Protestant” or “rich Catholic.”
• Noah found several places where Updike refered to characters as “rich” in paragraphs that gave their religious affiliation as “Catholic” (twice) and “Presbyterian” (once)
• Noah found many examples of other writers using the phrase “rich Jew” as if it had no antisemitic intent.

My point here is not that I like Updike’s wording myself. “Jew” makes me uncomfortable in a way that hearing “Catholic” or “Presbyterian” used as a noun would not–no matter who sticks what adjectives nearby. (My own background? NH-folksinging-Catholic.)

My point is that rhetorical questions get used to ratchet up conflict with nasty but thinly disguised accusations.*

I don’t like to see my opponents use dirty tricks–I like even less to see dirty tricks being used by folks on my side.

This is one more way search engines make all of us smarter.

* A second example from the Observer piece: “Is The New Yorker implicitly endorsing anti-Semitism in its pages?”

Rick Heller over at Blogging of the President used Feedster search to track the number of times each candidate got mentioned.*
In the comments on Rick’s post, arguments broke out. Supporters of different candidates swapped accusations. I was sad to see how each side’s conventional wisdom imagined the others in very negative ways.

I was thrilled to realize that Feedster (and other search engines) could kick down the walls that turn each “conventional wisdom” into an ugly echo chamber.

Good news! These are no longer unanswerable questions:

• What’s the ratio of positive-to-negative comments in each blog?
• Which candidate’s blog talks most about substantive issues?
• Which candidate’s supporters talk most about substantive issues?

Knowing such comparisons can be done should motivate all of us to campaign for our own guy in a positive way.

* I blogged about Rick’s research on Feedster’s Fuzzyblog, but I want to talk about some different stuff here.

The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human. – Aldous Huxley

O’Reilly Network: What We’re Doing When We Blog [Jun. 13, 2002]

For a lot of you veterans this RSS stuff is old hat–not to me! About six months ago I clicked my first XML button, and figured I’d just done something *bad* to my browser…

Check out these two different visions from two different blog friends:

Scott Johnson of Feedster, in a Waffle Iron interview.

“Think of blogs as your friends. No one really wants to travel to see their friends — not when you have a lot of them. What you want is them to come to you. And that’s what RSS does — it lets your friends (blogs you read) come to you.”

Lisa Williams at Cadence90:

“Western food .. involved a different division of labor between the cook and the eater — western cooks might put a steak on the plate, but a Chinese cook would be more likely to slice the steak into bite-size pieces easy to handle with chopsticks.

In a similar way, development of RSS is changing the division of labor between the author of web content and the reader of web content. Right now, the author is responsible for almost everything including the visual layout of the page. In an RSS world, the reader has much more control…”

Neil Gaiman does newbie-friendly RSS–with a text link from his home page to RSS Info:

RSS (Rich Site Summary) is a means of distributing Blog summaries in a lightweight XML format to let you keep up with what’s new in Neil’s Journal. You can now set up a desktop aggregator which will grab the RSS feed from this site (and others) and give you a short summary of any new postings that are available…[links to aggregators, more info, etc.]

When not blogging brilliantly about RSS, Neil writes books, including one of my favorite books–Stardust–and (much more famously Sandman and American Gods.