Daily EM

Some of you know that since early March I’ve been working on a side project — a meme-tracker for global news and ideas that would help us break through the echo chamber of news about the iPhone, Barack Obama or the Brangelina twins. I hardly imagined where I would end up when I started in early spring — with no technology or funding to pursue the idea of a meme-tracker that would crawl any blogs that I like and find what’s meme-worthy on them. But it seemed liked a fun project, so it was not that hard to invest almost all my time and savings in it; well, I learnt A LOT in the process — that was a good decision, after all. I didn’t really imagine that I’d end up with my own quite sophisticated system to track 25,000 blogs and a very intimate knowledge of Drupal — but this only proves how easy and cheap it’s become to innovate in the new media space.

Below you’ll find an email that I sent to most friends on launching the project — feel free to go ahead and experiment with it! Polymeme.com

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Dear friends:

I’m glad to finally announce the soft launch of polymeme.com . Polymeme is an innovative news aggregator that has kept me busy for the last few months.

Over the years of following the English-language blogosphere, I have become increasingly frustrated with the absence of news aggregators that could help me stay on top of important developments in non-tech areas. Fields like economics, design, law, environment, or literature didn’t seem to have their own Digg, Techmeme or Technorati; thus, navigating through the growing non-tech blogospheres has become very difficult. As the amount of information on the Web has kept growing rapidly, it has proved quite challenging to remain a true polymath, i.e. remain continuously well-informed about a multitude of fields, not just one.

So I decided to build such an aggregator myself. After a few months of intense experiments, I am proud to point you to polymeme.com, a meme-tracker designed to turn you into a true polymath. What makes it stand out from other aggregators is its unique approach to determining what’s important. Polymeme crawls topical clusters of blogs — for example, we have about 2,700 blogs in our books & poetry cluster and more than 2,000 blogs in our architecure & design cluster — to determine what are the most talked-about articles in each (we track a total of 25,000 blogs). In a sense, Polymeme leverages the expertise of experts who blog– economists, lawyers, scientists– to discover articles that truly matter.

A team of Polymeme editors then publishes snippets of the most interesting of these articles, along with links to ALL other blogs that are talking about them. The Polymeme editors also try to illustrate the most interesting entries with Creative Commons-licensed pictures from Flickr.

Please don’t also miss our PolyBuzz (http://www.polymeme.com/buzz) section. PolyBuzz relies on OpenCalais technology from Reuters to automatically tag ALL content produced by blogs in each of our clusters regardless of whether it makes it to Polymeme.com or not. Thus, the tags you see under our Economics section, for example, are generated based on ALL posts written by the economics blogs that we track.

Don’t forget that you can also customize your Polymeme experience by registering at http://polymeme.com/user/register and selecting only a handful of topics to watch — and getting a customized RSS feed to go with it. I’d also appreciate any feedback about Polymeme and possible future functions that you would like to see in it. Feel free to send me an email or, if you’d prefer to remain anonymous, you can also contact us through this form: http://www.polymeme.com/contact

Best wishes,

Evgeny

p.s. You’d be surprised to find out that most of the articles that Polymeme actually come from the traditional media. There is no contradiction here; as the Internet makes our public sphere more and more networked, it’s only natural that the border between new and traditional media gets very blurry. I hope that Polymeme will help you to uncover the best pieces from the both worlds.