The Toy Top

When you just want to watch something spin.

Personal: The bane of the blogosphere.

There's a marvelous thing about the internet: All the world's information can, and likely has, been made available for public viewing. But all this availablility has a couple kinks: For one, there's a lessening sense of privacy when people use Twitter to post the content of their lunch, and other seemingly meaningless details. (There is a slight upside to posting your personal life, though, but that's a slight one to me, and is for later on this post.) And for another, all this information being made available can leave people lost, adrift in the sea of news, news commentaries, commentary commentaries, and other iterations of this loop.

It's little surprise, then, that companies like Google and Yahoo have made a profit on a simple but profound purpose: To index the mash of information and let people find what they want in this mess. With all this information in their hands, these companies (I'm speaking of Google now, but I know Yahoo has pages of its own like these) then turned to another confusing mess: the happenings of the world. They've collected the articles released by the major news outlets and made them available in an easily readable form.

Falling in this vein is a webpage I recently discovered, called Newsbrane. It has a venerable premise: To analyze your Facebook profile and return news stories it thinks you might like. If you don't use Facebook (or like me, you came when the link to connect your profile was broken), you can browse a sample list of articles and then vote them up or down (following a simple "I like this" or "I don't like this" model) to create a picture of what you might read if given the option.

Like I said: I like this idea. Why crawl the news networks, making sure you steer clear of the inherent spin involved, when you can decide what you want to read? There's a kink in Newsbrane's system: When it finds what you like, at least initially, it does not match stories. It matches you to respective feeds to read. Again, I like this. It makes Newsbrane my one stop to read about politics, buisness, economics, and technology (the news articles I've rated up). However, my feed picture is now such that I cannot check my recomendations only once a day, for fear of floating adrift in the blogosphere again. If I leave my profile unchecked for, say, 5 hours (between waking up and after my last class, for example), I have about 40-50 stories to read. I could literally spend my whole day reading this stuff and only have a few hours for sleep.

I have narrowed this down to the fact that I don't like to rate stories down when they don't interest me (which is the point of the system, I now think - I started with stories I disliked, in case you were wondering). In today's reading, I have adopted this system and I would like to see where this goes.

This is not to the discredit of Newsbrane. I have read about many interesting things that would not have been brought to my attention if not for my desire to be connected with the news world. For example, proprietary microblogging systems are getting picked up by a few buisnesses to quickly communicate across the office. I have also been introduced to near-pointless things like Flip Title (or ǝlʇıʇ dılɟ as it calls itself) that provide a quick distraction.

To speak of the disclosure of one's personal life: In the article that described proprietary microblogging systems (a corporate Twitter, for people who don't like big words), they noted that even saying what you had for lunch or how you were passing your time at the moment could spark a conversation with a co-worker later on and build workplace camaraderie.

And now it's five in the morning. To bed with me.

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