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Sunday, October 15, 2006

Using Technorati RSS Feeds

Steve Rubel's post on using Technorati RSS Feeds. Need to think about how this applies to China and China VC (which doesn't really have an active blog ecosystem, or a clear community utilizing a set of tags).

His ideas on how to use this:

  • Track when a blogger discusses a specific subject. This seems incredibly useful, even for creating different channels for our own blogging activity. Can we use this on ourselves?
  • Drill down deeper into your favorite blogs.
  • Track memes that others don't follow. Its nice to piggyback of off established memes but what if the memes we are most interested in haven't already gel'ed?
  • Bucket your influencers into different feeds. I didn't really understand this.
Anyway, take a look at the original post and see what this might be used for.

2 comments:

Grigo said...

"Track memes that others don't follow. " What a great insight! But need to find an effecient way to track, sort, and select. Otherwise it will be too overwhelming.

I didn't understand the 4th item either.

Elliott Ng said...

OK, so your comment made me dig deeper into this! Basically I think we can turn any Technorati search into a RSS feed. So we might want to:
1. Search for bloggers mentioning Ebay China, in Chinese, but they must have some authority
2. Search for specific keywords, like "automotive club"

Track memes that others don't follow
I like Techmeme for generic tech news. I tried Tailrank that has a "my tail" tab, and uploaded all my Bloglines blogroll to it, but haven't gotten anything that interesting.

As you know, I'm interested in the concept of "crowdsourcing", getting the blogosphere to answer tough questions like: why did ebay fail in China? But there is no way to create a "crowdsourcing" meme tracker. Maybe technorati search can do this.

Steve Rubel's last example is less compelling. For example, if I want to track SecondLife (but only look at the top blogs that talk about SecondLife) then I can set up the search RSS feed with that criteria.

Thanks for pushing my thinking on this.