Comments on: Grokking PubSub and Data Lock In

By: Manuel

Manuel — Wed, 25 Jan 2006 00:56:48 +0000

I do not believe in the today’s time can one a company any longer than Sozialmschine designate, to humans belong to a company, otherwise it does not make fun!!

By: Bud Gibson

Bud Gibson — Tue, 14 Jun 2005 23:56:27 +0000

John, your point about structured blogging potentially enabling a better "bottom up" interface between content providers and aggregators is well taken. But, structured blogging has a real drawback. It requires going beyond html with little real standards support. For that reason, I don't think many people beyond pubsub are using it.

However, your skepticism about the eventual adoption of the bottom-up semantic web is not well-founded because there is a counter example already receiving wide uptake, xhtml microformats. The xhtml microformat approach is starting to get more widespread adoption because it is simpler, only requiring html. Think you have not heard of microformats? Technorati's reltag microformat, the one that allows you to put technorati tags in your posts, has had tremendous uptake and really put technorati's tag pages on the search engine map.

Do a google search for "podcasting" or "podcast", you'll see the technorati tag page in the top 10. I provide a little case study for how the reltag microformat made that happen here:

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/06/folksonomy_make.html

The analysis shows a real current business case for using microformats to affect your search visibility and thereby traffic flow. I provide an extended discussion of how it all works here:

http://thecommunityengine.com/home/archives/2005/06/microformats_pr.html

A group of about 20 independent developers is in the process of putting together a microformats repository. The technorati reltag experience has put forth the economic case which is apparent even to non-business people in the uptake the format has received.

By: adam moskowitz

adam moskowitz — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 18:03:04 +0000

what about human filters? i want to see a search engine based on tastemakers, word of mouth and the subsequent chain reaction. who is the company that can deliver a “social engine”?

By: Brian

Brian — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 22:30:42 +0000

How many places does PubSub expect me to go to get search results? I go to one single place for all of them. I bet you can guess where it is. I’m not big on grey web black web white web deep web shallow web spider web. It’s just one web, isn’t it?

By: John Franklin

John Franklin — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 22:14:06 +0000

Applaud efforts to make the interface easier to use. I well understand that the priority was on making sure the back-end engine functioned. But it's been frustrating to go to the site and run into bugs of various kinds - even if your tech guys are professional. The new government interface is a leap forward, as are LinkStats. Keep up the good work...

By: Bob Wyman

Bob Wyman — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 20:45:28 +0000

Greg Linden: You are absolutely correct in saying that we’ve got to make it easier for people to get just those results that they are looking for. So far, our focus at PubSub has been primarily on solving the problem of matching at Internet Scale (i.e. 3 billion matches per second is our current benchmark number). In the future, we’re going to be turning our attention more to the problem of making the system easier to use. First, we made it work, now we’ve got to make it easy to use.

We’re also working on the duplicate detection issue that Gary mentioned in his comment. Of course, wide adoption of Atom V1.0 — once finalized — will make that a great deal easier. But, we’ve still got much to do to improve general duplicate detection and duplicate detection in legacy RSS feeds. Please bear with us while we solve these difficult problems.

If you’ve got any ideas on how to make it easier for you to get what you want from PubSub, please don’t hesitate to send your ideas to me or to feedback@pubsub.com

bob wyman

By: Peter Caputa

Peter Caputa — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 20:11:21 +0000

Greg Linden: "Future solutions will need to learn what information you want and construct the filters automatically, personalizing the information stream for your individual needs."

Good point, Greg. I guess that's where findory comes in. Like I've blogged before, I think pubsub, findory and feedburner are the companies to watch in this burgeoning market.

By: Greg Linden

Greg Linden — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 19:50:59 +0000

The information overload problem looms large for these types of alert systems. You really don't want every job posting, book review, or thing for sale. You want job postings appropriate to you, interesting book reviews, and things for sale that you might want to buy.

Grappling with this problem isn't trivial. Current solutions require people to manually construct queries that only return manageable amounts of interesting and useful information, a laborious task that will frustrate most mainstream users.

Future solutions will need to learn what information you want and construct the filters automatically, personalizing the information stream for your individual needs.

By: John Battelle

John Battelle — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 18:52:27 +0000

Yup, should have made that more clear, have done so.

By: Jeff Clavier

Jeff Clavier — Fri, 03 Jun 2005 17:34:46 +0000

Not to be picky but PubSub crawls and indexes feeds, not blogs (I had that conversation with Bob 2 days ago). Which means that their matching technology can be applied to anything delivered via RSS/Atom, and delivers a higher level of precision because they operate on semi-structured content (like Feedster does).