Social vs Algorithm Filtering

Three twts do not a summer make, but I was musing this morning on the changing nature of where I got my blog reading from - and then a comment from Steve Bowbrick and a link to this post by Fred Wilson popped up (on Twitter). Fred's post notes that:

I've never used an RSS reader. I've used services like Techmeme and Hacker News to surface interesting posts for me. I still do. I visit each of them about five or six times a day. They are my RSS readers for tech news. Twitter does the same thing for me, but I also get stock news, political news, family/friend news, and some humor too. It's like reading a custom built newspaper.

But enough about Twitter. This post is about Techmeme. I've been obsessed with Techmeme for the past couple years. And I think that obsession is coming to an end. I still plan to visit it as much every day. But I think I'll stop jonesing for my posts to get picked up there. The conversation is happening all over the place anyway and I don't think any one service will ever be able to host it all anyway.

....and Steve notes that:

I discover more interesting stuff in my first 10 minutes on Twitter in the morning than in a fortnight of... you know... all the other stuff

I started reading "blogs" via surfing and RSS reader, overloaded my RSS reader (as one does), then stripped it down and started reading via Technorati search. It became clear hat what I was doing was looking for filtering sstems, so I set off to look at what was going on there. Digg and Delicious never did it for me - a bit too random. Tried taking in a few Big Blogs (TechCrunch, GigaOm) but they seemed too narrow to use as "filters". When Techmeme came along I was very impressed, though as Fred notes, of late its gone more for the Big Blogs so there is less variety (and more PR primping in my view). Friendfeed never did it for me, I think its partly critical mass, but partly format - most people there are not saying anything that could not be condensed to 140 characters.

Like Steve, I have been amazed at how Twitter has moved over the last year from being an airhead's delight to a system that is becoming remarkably good at filtering and highlighting interesting stuff.

So I am now watching with fascination to see how the Algorithm filter (Techmeme) and the Social Network Filter (Twitter) vie for influence on my (and others') attention span in the future.