Introducing the feedmixer: Aggregation, tagging, filtering key to EU blogosphere

In February 2008, Jon Worth wrote an article about the best approach to make the EU blogosphere more accessible. In his article, Jon featured a pyramid outlining the multi-level efforts within EU blogosphere:

For those who have not done so, please read first Jon's post and the comments that have been submitted.

The interesting bit is the area with the question mark. For me, the requirements from a user point of view for the top triangle in the pyramid are as follows:

1. Such a service needs to show me what is new: aggregation of EU related blogs, one place to monitor the EU blogosphere
   


2. Such a service needs to show me what it is and whether it's good: tagging and voting by editors and/or users
   
   
3. Such a service needs to show me what is relevant (to me): filtering based on profiles, preferences, recommendations
   
   

There have been a lot of comments and several follow-up posts by others to Jon's post so far. Among the many comments I would like to cite the following one, which I found to be one the most challenging:

Alejandro Ribo writes:

"What is the point of having hundreds of contributors, thousands of news items that people are potentially interested in, if you are only using a tiny part of it, because the rest doesn't have any meaning beyond a small contextual space."

... and even after following the discussion on Jon's original post Alejandro notes:

"In any case, I still think that simply aggregating and selecting Euroblogs would be half of the job done. To find a system to give meaning to this amount of information in an semi-automated way could offer a very good service, but probably I am just being difficult."

Giving meaning to the blog posts (ie by means of tagging) is indeed a very important feature.

Now, let's have a look at which tools exist so far:

Blogactiv

Jon Worth writes in his article that ...

"EU news website Euractiv has made the only serious investment to date in a broader attempt to structure the Euro-blogosphere."

... but further comments:

"The problem with Euractiv / Blogactiv is that it’s a closed system - you have to blog on Blogactiv to get anyone to read what you write. They don’t syndicate from anywhere else. That’s very much different to Politikportal or Bloggers4Labour…"

See also comment by Christophe Leclercq, publisher of Blogactiv's mother company EurActiv.com.

Note that the closed character of Blogactiv also applies to Cafebabel's babelblogs.

My review of Blogactiv:

• Show me what's new: partly (only Blogactiv posts are shown on front page)
• Show me what's good: partly (ranking on Speak Up Europe blog)
• Show me what's relevant: -
  

Note: we will soon see an upgrade of Blogactiv which addresses some of the above issues, namely the editorial highlighting of of blog posts on the front page.

The Eurovalley project

Ossi is the first one to respond on Jon's post and has already a plan:

"I have given a lot of thought to this as well. I am working, alone at this stage at least, on developing simple blog tracker software for Euroblogs. [...] Unfortunately I am not a programmer, but a lawyer, so the development is likely to take some time. I am working on the specs at the moment, and will decide in the end whether it is easier to code it myself or to outsource the coding to someone else.

Ossi then had a test setup of Pligg but abandonded the project for the moment: See here the Eurovalley test site

Kosmopolit tested Eurovalley for some days and comments:

"The process of submitting news takes just too long. The user has to fill in too many fields: title, summary, category and tags. Other bookmarking services only require tags and recognise titles (also using a browser integration); summaries/categories could be optional. Anyway everyone seems to copy/ paste the first couple of sentences in the summary box so maybe this can be done automatically?"

My review of Eurovalley:

• Show me what's new: yes (upcoming and published news sections)
  
• Show me what's good: yes (registered users can vote)
• Show me what's relevant: partly (could maybe be customised)

Main problem: submitting stories is too time-consuming, no discovery of feeds, no permanenent aggregation of blogs.

Blog directories

Nosemonkey, Jon Worth, LoicLeMeur and EurActiv currently have more or less static EU blog directories that will be important starting points for discovering the EU blogsphere.

Further, Kosmopolit, Nosemonkey and to some sort Blogactiv have built RSS aggregators within a Netvibes universum

My review of Netvibes universum:

• Show me what's new: yes (via netvibes rss/widget page)
  
• Show me what's good: - (not yet)
• Show me what's relevant: -
  
  

Introducing the feed mixer

Building on what exists up to now, Jon Worth's post, the comments by others and my own thoughts I propose the following architecture for the top pyramid:


This is a proposal for how the ? area in Jon's original could be filled. In my view, such a website would need to take into consideration at least the following components:

1) The aggregator: All proper blogs offer RSS or Atom newsfeeds. These feeds need to be collected and aggregated. Then all posts have to be displayed in reverse chronological order (tries respond to "show me what's new").

2) The feed mixer: It is here where the good blog posts and those that are more important than others need to be selected (waiting for your comments and suggestions). To do this, one idealy starts with pouring only good blogs in the aggregator. Then editors and users will be able to tag and vote on posts. The application start page should feature a daily selection of recommended blog posts. Other output forms would be customised, individual output pipes in forms of RSS feeds, widgets and further APIs. (tries to respond to "show me what's good")

3) You: The best filter is the end user. Let's use some of your time to filter out what is relevant to you. This involves setting of your favourite EU topics and blog preferences (tries to respond to "show me what's relevant")


In order to avoid that Alejandro Ribo's fear of "having hundreds of contributors, thousands of news items that people are potentially interested in" becomes true one would need to strictly limit the aggregation to the "EU blogosphere". What is inside the EU blog bubble and what's not could be defined by a team of 10-20 editors (which themselves could be elected from among the EU bloggers participating in the project, if one wants to be very democratic)

Next steps

I have put already considerable effort in the development of a technical architecture for such a blog aggregator. The above is a description of the work-in-progress in order to invite input and feedback.

In the coming weeks I'd like to keep you informed about the developments of the EU blog aggregator and reader, which should hopefully launch before the summer break.

All those that have participated in the debate will receive an invite for beta testing the application. Stay tuned...


The author is publisher of the german language EU policy news website www.politikportal.eu