Bob and I have been working on a tool for keeping track of the various conversations going on in the Tablet/UMPC/MID/ultra-mobile space. Although each of us has our favorite feeds that we check multiple times every day, we know we’re missing some great threads. Ultimately we know we need to read more content in order to find those conversation gems. The tool we’re building tries to make this a bit easier.
The idea is to collect the various RSS feeds from Tablet/ultra-mobile sites/blogs and group their content based on things such as who’s linking to whom, how many comments there are, the time of the post, and so on. Here’s a snapshot of what today’s Tablet talk is about:
(Click on the image above for a full-sized view)
This is just a partial screen capture of the items listed, but it gives an idea how the sites are shown. Actually, since this screenshot is a bit small, here’s a better look at the top of the page:
Here you can see that two Digitimes articles made it to the top of the list and various sites are linking to the articles.
As you can see, this is more than an RSS reader. We’re trying to organize the RSS articles so that we can quickly and easily get to the most compelling and “active” stories. It’s like TechMeme in that respect, however, this conversation viewer is tuned to conversations of the scale that go on in markets such as the Tablet PC/UMPC space. In fact, the tool is architected so that other sets of links covering other domains can be used instead.
The ordering of the list and links is still evolving. In fact, I imagine that the algorithm will be tweeked for as long as the tool is being used. That’ll be the nature of this kind of tool. It’ll “never be done.”
Anyway, there’s still lots to do: bugs to fix, feeds to add, server to set up, and so on, but so far so good. Step by step.
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