Wading Through Weblogs, One Idea at a Time

candot writes "Remember the recent slashdot story on NASA cancelling the moon hoax book? Wonder what other weblogs are saying about the subject? Launched today (in beta), the Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics. The Waypath Project's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This is done all automatically. Look for the disclaimers about varying quality you'd expect from an automated classification system, such as at Google News. You're encouraged to embed WP results in your weblog pages. Be the first on your block to try it out, today -- unless it gets slashdotted, then tomorrow. Resources are limited, so pace yourselves."

Comments

It's written in Java?

[SexyKellyOsbourne]

It's proprietary, closed-source, dirt slow, written in Java, inaccurate, and prone to nasty debug screens.

Take a look at slashdot, livejournal, and everything2 -- everything works like clockwork. I think the open source community could, and should, write better code for this.

Wondering?

[sczimme]

Wonder what other weblogs are saying about the subject?

Ummm... no. But thanks anyway.

Combining with E2?

[Psychic Burrito]

I always thought that combining the setup of Everything2 and a massive amout of blogs would create something great. This is a step in this direction. Is there anybody else agreeing that combining E2 with Waypath would make the best reference source ever?

Re:'blogs'

[Anonymous Coward]

I use mine as an online work journal, as do many others. Many engineering jobs require a work journal, so I've kept up the habit by keeping mine online and accessible from anywhere. Here's one (a systems programmer) that has links to a lot of other mostly work-related journals.

Take a look at memigo

[costas]

[This is a plug]

Memigo spots memes and interesting news ahead of weblogs, including Slashdot, instead of relying on trailing metrics like blogs. How? it monitors how users rate individual articles and creates personalised recommendations for each user (yep, kinda like Amazon).

The sites and articles are also inserted into a web of trust, so when a new article/meme shows up, it inherits the trusts of its author and recommenders. The point is to be a leading indicator of interest and sniff out interesting news first...

To be fair, memigo parses a few blogs too (that tend to make news, rather than follow them, such as /.); but really it can use anything as a trust metric.

Try it, you will be pleasantly suprised --yes, you need a login for the personal recommendations, but there is no requirement for any personal info, including any sort of e-mail address...

About the Waypath Project

[mattsmigs]

For those who can't be bothered to go and read it/for when it gets Slashdotted:

What is it?

The Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics.

How does it work?

The Waypath Project's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This is done all automatically, using available technology.

Where does the data come from?

WP makes use of public weblog update lists, which it crawls several times each day. We use a custom spider to grab changed files from individual weblogs. We make our best effort to grab new weblog entries the same day their posted, depending on resource availability. Learn more about data selection here.

Why does quality vary?

What the Waypath Project is doing is not trivial. Sometimes Waypath results are amazingly on target, sometimes you can kind of see the thread that relates weblog entries, sometimes you're left scratching your head. We're constantly working to make results better, as time allows.

Why isn't WP open source?

The core of WP is based on a proprietary, commerical technology that Think Tank 23 has generously donated to this project. However, the tools developed by the Waypath Project will be released into the open source community as time allows.

Who funds WP?

You do, along with others. Check out the donors page for more info.

Why is this site so spartan?

This site is run by two guys in their spare time (a couple of hours each week, if we're lucky). Most of that time is spent massaging and enhancing the spider. Ater that, we spend as much time as we can making the results better. You can help by donating, so we can spend more time on everything, including adding more info to the site, if that's your thing.

Sounds like a grim idea

[melonman]

If an infinite number of bloggers write an infinite number of postings, and a search engine cross-references them all, does this give us anything more than Word Salad? If the site wasn't broken I'm curious enough to try it, but I'm sceptical. Most blogs are (possibly) interesting if you know the people: otherwise, they are about as thrilling as someone else's holiday snaps. And the most used category is going to be me me me...

Also, newsy weblogs such as /. end up being cross-referenced anyway, because sooner or later someone posts a 'hey have you seen what they are saying on...' message.

Just stop now

[Anonymous Coward]

the Waypath Project is an attempt to network the weblog community, connecting weblogs that share common themes, ideas, and topics.

They're called "Web rings". You might remember them.

Asides from that, who the hell cares what some kid in Tacoma thinks about the NASA book? Or, for that matter, who the hell cares what a kid in Tacoma thinks about anything? No one.

WBELOGS == TEH GEYEST! Just stop.

Re:'blogs'

[Sc00ter]

I always seem to see stuff like this. People really either hate blogs or like them, there isn't much in between. I keep a blog but I usually don't use it to just bitch about life or whatever. I talk about projects I'm working on, stuff that's going on with my life in general. I have a friend that uses his to talk about his home improvements that I find interesting since I'm going to be searching for a house soon and it gives me ideas on what to look for and how hard it will be to fix things that are wrong.

Sure, there are ones that are just a bitch fest for people, and I've used mine to complain about crappy things at work (usually about the shitty security in the computer system I don't have any control over) but if you don't like them, don't read them..

Re:'blogs'

[nomadic]

Not at all. There are plenty of weblogs run by non-teenage angsty, maladjusted primadonnas.

And does the name "blog" annoy the hell out of anyone else either? The only people I can picture using the term are annoying hipsters down at Starbucks trying to impress each other as they slam back frappucinos.

Link weblogs ,eh?

[Raul654]

So sally breaks up with don, whose weblog indicates he's now really hot for janet, could care less about Don but really like Barry, who donkey punched Jane, who is best friend with Sally. Hrm... makes it so much clearer now

But does it actually work?

[Flamesplash]

So just as a test I plopped the URL http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20021107. html from the /. story Could Eolas End Microsoft's Browser Dominance? into the search field on the Waypath Project page and well all it ended up giving me was a bunch of Microsoft related hits, nothing to really do with the specifics of the article itself. Maybe the word "Microsoft" is too prevalent and therefor overweighted?

Blogdex: more better, less beta

[EnlightenmentFan]

If you want to know what weblogs are saying about the Nasa moon hoax story then I recommend you get psycholog^H^H^H^H put a bookmark on good old Blogdex. Fine format, good leads to web stories both nerdy and not. You want links (and related weblogs) for the text of the UN Resolution on Iraq, the hockey dad suing to get his son named MVP, or a simple tool to give you the size and text of any web page? They're on Blogdex today.

I suppose

[mao che minh]

that this would generally be a good idea, except for the fact that there are already thriving weblog communities that: A. Are nice to look at (or in the least, have an efficient design and layout), B. Have a working search engine in operation, C. Are not built on dog slow, closed projects.

Slow news day, huh /. ?

Unified weblog

[GoRK]

What, no mention of Blogdex, the Media Diffusion Index? It's several years old, and is pretty good at picking current trends.

~GoRK

Re:The focus of the different weblogs are differen

[JabberWokky]

Funny, I come to Slashdot to read the juicy details of Kathleen Fent's life.

--
Evan

The Weblog MetaData Initiative

[HealYourChurchWebSit]

I like sites like this ... but isn't their already an effort to define and tie blogging communities via the The Weblog MetaData Initiative?

I mean, Waypath is at one level convenient, but no more so than well established weblog communities such as
blo.gs, the Eaton WebPortal and blogs4God. Moreover, when it comes to gleaning headline news via a blog, I would suspect the real weapon of cohice would be our personal aggregators such as Amphetadesk and HotSheet?

Which is where the WMDI comes in. It helps me identify sites via xml-ish mechanisms such as the Dublin Core Initiative ... which is why I would think someone who's blogging their brains out for the hottest headlines might not be better served by the WMDI.

Then again, your mileage may vary.