A P2P News Aggregator on MyToday

I recently wrote an overview of the best blogs on peer to peer, the kind of sources that you should or could monitor to keep abreast of developments in this area.

Some time ago, I was contacted by the founders of My Today, a neat service which allows you to read all your blogs on just one web page. So we fed the results of our selection to them, and there is now a page that you can consult, see My Today’s P2P News . My Today wants to help internet users create many such topical and personal ‘dailies’ and has created a collaborative Wiki to seek support in this endeavour.
For background on the concept of an Aggregator , the difference between a ‘dumb’ and a ‘smart‘ aggregator, as well as media reconstructors, see our Wiki Encyclopedia.
Here are some details about the My Today news aggregator initiative from the Unmediated blog:

MyToday.com (created by us at Netcore) is a public RSS aggregator providing the latest news, views and content on a topic-based collection of feeds, called Dailies. It is simultaneously available on the web through an Ajax client and on the mobile phone in WML. Check it out and let me know what you think of it, and of enhancements you’d like to see.

Here is how my colleague, Veer Bothra, describes the thinking behind MyToday.

Public versus Personal Aggregators: Personal aggregators like bloglines.com, my.yahoo.com, live.com etc. give the users an empty plate which needs to be filled with feeds which the user knows about. This approach ignores the fact that users in general are interested in a subject but not necessarily aware about quality feeds and sources in that area. A public aggregator like MyToday.com depends on editorial expertise to choose and pick the best sources in a subject. This way, the reader can get going without any sweat.

Source versus Stories: Aggregators like news.google.com, topix.net are story based. Their endeavor is to distill the most important stories at any point of time. MyToday’s selection is based on the quality of the source and not on the stories. Therefore the selection process when making a Daily is stringent to maintain the quality of content.

Micro-content Client: MyToday consists of a Micro-content client and an aggregation system. The micro-content client is built keeping in mind the nature of micro-content like blog posts and news stories. They are small in size, large in volume and more often than not, time sensitive. MyToday’s micro-content client makes it easier to consume lots of information quickly.

Aggregation System: MyToday’s underlying feed aggregation system claims to turnaround Dailies in 30 minutes. Give it an OPML of feeds and it can create a new Daily in 30 minutes which then auto-updates. Niche information / content verticals, available on both PC and mobile, can be created and served with low human intervention.�

Leave A Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.