Putting the “Me” in Megite

Megite has garnered my attention recently. Two reasons: (1) they’ve been including me in more discussions than does Techmeme (yeah, that’s hard) and (2) Matthew Chen of Megite has eagerly worked with me via e-mail to make the most of my Megite experience. That kind of service always gets my attention.

After noticing Megite popping up in my referrer logs and blog vanity searches, I wanted to set up some sort of monitor for when my posts made it onto Megite. I thought maybe I could use the “personal Megite” feature to monitor just my sites, and Matthew patiently set that up for me. But that didn’t fly, because I didn’t fully understand the feature. Instead, I was able to achieve my goal by sending the Megite technology feed through FeedRinse, and subscribing to the result of this filter:

As you can see, the same approach also works for Techmeme (or should, Gabe hasn’t given me a chance to find out yet).

Thinking about my Megite misconception, I realized just how useful the personal Megite could be as a feed reader. Here’s how it works. You send Matthew an OPML file of your usual reads (or better yet, a link to it so you can update it dynamically). Matthew constructs a Megite section based on that reading list. You read that section or subscribe to its feed.

What does that give you more than Bloglines? Related content. The Megite engine lists other posts (that may or may not be on your list) that discuss the same topics.

My only gripe: the section has a partial feed. That means you don’t see the related items unless you’re reading it on megite.com. Even there, the posts themselves are abbreviated — but that works well for quick scanning and filtering.

As you can see, Megite also includes some images. Not sure how the image selection works. They aren’t always from the post, and yet not all images are included. Perhaps Matthew will explain that algorithm to satisfy my curiosity.

Here’s the result for my reading list, which I affectionately call “Chip’s Blips“. Here’s the OPML it’s based on. When I first signed up, the personal Megite was an “as available” feature, but it looks like now Matthew has removed that verbiage from the page. Give it a try and report back.