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.

Did you ever subscribe to a feed just because it’s one of those blogs you’re supposed to read…only to wade through several days of posts with your eyes glazing over before saying “who needs this soporific” and unsubscribing? I’m not naming names, or hurling urls. You know which ones they are.

Then you come across a blog that nobody has ever heard about, but it grabs your eye. Yes, it’s got you by your vitreous humor and it’s not letting go. You find yourself wasting precious time reading all of the recent posts. You can’t really say what attracts you about the site — there’s something in the writer’s style — is it engaging? surprising? Who knows. You end up subscribing, against the protests of your bulging feed reader.

The next day, and the day after that, you eagerly seek the author’s new posts in your aggregator. You wonder if your initial assessment of the content will prove hasty — but you aren’t disappointed. It’s still good stuff. Better yet, you get into a comment/trackback banter with the author, and you find that entertaining as well.

Of course I’m talking about Look! Tracy has a Camera. Tracy has offbeat, humorous thoughts about the most mundane things — with pictures! Like this one. And this one. And especially this one. And I see that today Tracy is Randy Charles Morin’s Blogger of the Day. Congratulations, Tracy! Nice choice, Randy.

What is that essence of humor anyway? That ability to sift through all of the normal to find the deranged? Part of it is in being able to give voice to what you really think inside. Most of us were taught to suppress that, to be polite. Hanging on in quiet desperation and all. You gotta let your desperation have a voice. Get in touch with your inner psycho. For instance, a boring blogger would say something like:

I have a dentist appointment this afternoon, so I won’t be blogging again until tomorrow.

Thankzzz for the update.

But interesting bloggers reveal more of what is going on inside:

I have a dentist appointment this afternoon. I often wonder what would happen if the dentist’s office experienced a power surge while the drill is buzzing through my tooth. Would the increased RPM’s drill right down through my jaw? Or would the voltage spike cause the current to jump from the device and into my fillings, sending me to “ride the light” mouth-first? What if my dentist has an epileptic seizure and carves up my mouth like a jack-o-lantern?

OK, I’m off. If you don’t hear from me by tomorrow, I bequeath my blog to the research lab of the Centers for Applied Paranoia.

Huh. Nick’s right, you can get the “river of news” view in FeedDemon, simply by selecting the folder rather than a specific feed. I guess Nick should know. Nice. FeedDemon does seem to slow down quite a bit when composing the “newspaper” for my 74 feeds, though.

Oh, and thanks for the linkage, Nick.

Dave’s riding his River of News steamboat again. One aggregator he didn’t mention that implemented that style is the Google Desktop “News” gadget. I haven’t used it since version 2.0, but that was my first aggregator and I did get used to that style. What I liked about it? If I went for a few days without reading anything, I didn’t know what I had missed because it scrolled off the end of the retained items. Good and bad, that.

I like what Scoble had to say, despite what Dave calls “kissing up” to Arrington. Sometimes I like having feeds segregated by source, because I want to go see what a particular party thinks about the daily blogstorm, rather than viewing the latest rants. Or when things aren’t so hectic (when was that?), it’s nice to sit down with one person’s thoughts for the day. On the other hand, sometimes it would be nice just to get the latest stories handed to me.

I want it both ways. Why can’t an aggregator give you a hot-swap option? That’s a hint, Nick. Let me know if I can help.

It’s a good thing I didn’t blog last night. After driving 200 miles in five hours with two screaming kids and one over-stressed wife, I popped the cork off my favorite cheap red and proceeded to quiet the echoing voices in my head. Excelsior Cab, $7.99 at Central Market. I’ve asked them to get Stormhoek, but they haven’t found it yet. It probably isn’t cheap, either. I didn’t even ask.

Anyway, I didn’t even take my laptop on our “vacation” after all. One of my clients advised me to leave it behind — even though she’s patiently awaiting delivery of a new feature from me. It’s nice to have clients who are people, too. And it was good to get away from the buzz for a while. Or at least, that buzz. But when I got back online last night, I had over 200 non-spam e-mail messages waiting for me. By the time I zipped through those (delete, delete, delete) and then read the comments on my blog entries (sipping all the while) I was feeling pretty cheerful.

Which is why it’s a good thing I didn’t blog last night. Any angst or ire would have only come through as tearful blubbering. That goes for happy thoughts, too. No need to wail out to everyone in the blogosphere about how much I love you and how much I missed you over the weekend and isn’t it so cool that two of my favorite bloggers got into an almost heated conversation in my absence. So I spared the world.

Needless to say (but I will, anyway), I’ve got a ton of work to catch up on. Plus, I have to knock off early today — meeting an old high school friend and his family in Seattle for dinner tonight. I haven’t seen him in about 18 years. Should be interesting catching up.

I’m not even going to try to skim the 488 unread feed items in my aggregator (make that 504 — it just polled again). If I fail to respond to anything that you intended to get my attention, it probably fell victim to a hasty “Mark Feed Read”.