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The death of the A-list?

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There are two important events that happened recently in the blogosphere:
1) The launch of https://www.memeorandum.com/ - a web site to automatically generate a summary of "what's hot" in the blogosphere, and
2) The widely expected launch of the first blog search engine that is actually usable: blogsearch.google.com

I personally believe that, sooner or later, all major search engines will offer similar capabilities. It makes perfect sense to offer a separate search service for blog content: the list of RSS feeds is not changing often (not more often that the contents of regular web pages). Also, any search engine with a decent web coverage can identify all the RSS points. Therefore, it makes sense that all major search engines will become huge, massive RSS aggregators.

Web search is probably the killer web application of the last five years. But I think that the next important killer web app is automated news generation. Actually, I would think that automated news generation is something that we are just beginning to understand. As a whole, the industry will get better and better in the near term on things like personalization, summary generation, automatic trust calculation, "hot factor" calculation, usability and so on.

What all this means for us?

First of all, the importance of your personal RSS reader will be diminished. You will get better news coverage from an automated news generator than from a static list of RSS subscriptions stored in your RSS reader. 

Second, the A-list will become less important. The A-list won't dissapear, probably, but people will stop using them as the ultimate source of "hot news". Especially affected will be bloggers that excel in being consistently the first in providing interesting stuff. But some bloggers won't be affected - those that always provide a distinct, personalized spin on the current events. Anyway, it will be important to note that, in blogging, it will be less and less important to come up with "fresh" stuff, and more and more important to come up with original stuff. Alternatively, there might be some sort of "trust calculation" algorithms that will allow the news generators to generate their own A-list on the fly.

Third, some bloggers that seek large volumes of readers will try to "optimize" for these automated news generators, in a similar way that copywriters optimize today their pages for high MSN/Google/Yahoo traffic.

Fourth, the biggest success of RSS will happen when people will forgot what RSS stands for, and where it is actually used. Most people don't understand these details anyway. So, it's about time to have this RSS reader integration for granted everywhere. As a reader, you shouldn't care about RSS when you just want to read news on PDC 2010 for example... :-)

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2005
    Bad links.

    Also, it might not be a good idea to disclose to the world that you use Google search instead of MSN (by leaving the Google redirectors in there), it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in your company's competence!
  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2005
    Thanks for the feedback.

    >>> Also, it might not be a good idea to disclose to the world that you use Google search instead of MSN (by leaving the Google redirectors in there), it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in your company's competence!

    That's because I searched for Robert's articles using blogsearch.google.com. Yes, MSN doesn't have something like this today (at least not at this level) but I would expect to come up with something similar though... :-) Anyway I removed the redirections since it's slowing down the redirection anyway.
  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2005
    I don't exactly get what the praise is all about. If you search for AntiMail on Google BlogSearch, you get September 7th posts, or something. It's not like you haven't posted anything from then or something, my RSS aggregator tells me something different ;-)
  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2005
    blogsearch is the first fast search engine for blogs. That is a critical feature.

    I already find it useful in the following scenario: given a certain keyword (say: hotmail) I want to know who blogged on this. Technorati/Bloglines can do that too bit I found them way too slow (especially technorati).

    That said, blogsearch.google.com still lacks really basic features (present in bloglines or technorati) like blog ranking, citations, etc. Also, I would like more granular search queries, like excluding a blog from the results, looking to blogs posts that contain a URL, etc.

    So, there is still room for vast improvement...
  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2005
    Interesting discussion. I too am interested to see how MSN Search responds to this.

    Thanks for the link btw :)
  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2008
    PingBack from http://drinkingrecipesblog.info/antimail-the-death-of-the-a-list/