I’ve been zapped! Or is it unzapped?
December 30th, 2006 3:08:44 pm pst by Sterling Camden
Today WebZappR picked up this post in its aggregated coverage of the “Why Web 2.0 is more than a buzzword” meme. Never heard of WebZappR? Neither had I. Google it and all you get are links to the site itself, or trackbacks from their blog. I tried searching on MakeYouGoHmm, KBCafe and even TechCrunch and got no results.
WebZappR appears to be yet another TechMeme/TailRank/Megite: aggregate related stories around memes. The about page states:
With all the webbuzz going around there is a need to filter the flood of information that is published every day in order to find what is really going on.
WebZappR is going to do exactly this. This project is dedicated to find a way to filter the information overload and provide you with the most valuable information in the internet. The WebZappR blog is part of a case study that utilizes various techniques to automatically filter the content in the internet and unlike a lot of other mashups provide you only with the best of it.
We do not want to provide you with a load of information we want to do all the zapping for you and only stop at the channels that provide the webcreme for the moment.
WebZappR’s goal is to create a symfony of the existing Services like digg, del.icio.us, youtube and various others and provide you with one single pick up point for your daily surfing cycle.
Sit back and relax while we channelize the internet for you and provide you with the creme de la creme of the world wide web.
The WebZappR Crew
The operative phrase appears to be “going to”. Not sure what a “symfony” is, either (other than the name of a PHP framework).
The emphasis here seems to be more on filtering than on aggregating. It will be interesting to see what this evolves into.
But I do appreciate the link-love. Even though they only included the main URL for my blog, not the URL of the post in question — and since they didn’t include the full text of that post, it’s unlikely that anyone would be able to read all of it. I’m fine with summarizing the post, in fact I prefer it — but the link should go directly to the full post. Obviously, their crawler (or whatever discovery mechanism they use) must have encountered the content on the main page, but it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out where to get the permalink to the specific text in question by examining the autodiscovered feed.
And do we really need another final “r” without the “e”? That’s soo 2006, yet they bring attention to the Lone R by capitalizing it.
Anybody from WebZappR listening? Can you fill us in on your vision? What will make you better than the other meme-trackers? In hard coin, not marketing-speak please. Features, algorithm, breadth of sources, etc.
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. . . especially since you’re using WordPress, one of the most common and most fully documented (in terms of APIs) weblog applications available.
It’s just a fantasy, all this slinging around of pause control, the elaborated slippers of web filtering, channel focusing, and gateway paradise.
I must be my own filter. I must pre-surf the web, grope through the lumpy fog myself, in the dark, with trust-linking and digital intuition, crippled by blindness to the undulating waves of sewage, we press on: dumping this, adopting that.
That’s not to forget the self-policing and autoimmune systems of the blogosphere as contributing to the investigation.
There’s a very distinct problem with taking this “let someone else aggregate and rate before I ever see any content” approach: you never discover something new that hasn’t already been discovered by thousands of others.
Yet I don’t mean to downplay how troublesome it is to do a Google search and have to swim through miles of garbage to find the few gems.
Each blog is a sort of portal to what the blogger thinks is interesting and relevant. But the web is like a library and you don’t have a portal there, just the card catalog. A librarian may help you, but basically, you have to learn to search the library on your own.
Interesting observations from both of you.
Yes, I agree that only browsing pre-filtered content gets you quickly into a rut. But sometimes I use the aggregation side of these tools to find related content. Of course, I suppose a Technorati or Google search works just as well, if you know what to search for.