Well, start an aggregator, and monitor that list!  Currently, there aren't many "elitist" Macromedia aggregators; why not be the first?  Monitoring mailing lists sux unless your Tact-Meister-G, so the same rules apply.
 
Filtering the good from the noise is what I rely on "filter" bloggers for.  People like Flash Magazine, John Dowdell, etc.  Either sub-scribe to them, or become one and utilize Google Ads to pay yourself.
 
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Monday, October 03, 2005 4:10 PM
Subject: Re: [osflash] [OT] Upping the quality of Flash rss feeds?

Hi Guys,

Thank you for encouraging my blather with intelligent responses.

Jesse, I think you are right that I should take up feed demon (or Omea), but interestingly as a developer, I can't start thinking about all that work that without thinking, well if I'm going to do all the work of categorizing, is there a way to use that? And worse, how can I trust my own choices? I can't without an accompanying editorial process. I don't see it as worth my time to be one of 2,000 developers that each take the time to add and filter through an increasingly increasing number of feeds without supporting each other is some way.

Good feeds could become loosy goosy feeds too. And many good feeds are 90% crap 10% gold. So why not create a server side custom feed so that if I rate and filter things, others can use the same thing, grouping feeds. But then it becomes a part of a job, and an unreliable one unless there is a well understood protocol to enforce, and others to help the editorial process, which there doesn't seem to be. If there was one I think the content would adhere to it.

The notion is generally that writing is taken care of by rss and atom, but editing and reliability aren't  and editing is the value that the process of publishing really adds.

John what I envision is this.
1) a set of specs of varying levels of hierarchy and specificity, customized to a community(osflash) with a review board that puts the sequence in stone and gives it a name. For starters v1. 0 might have 200 catagories.
2) a protocol for strictly reliable feeds that adhere to the specs and a way to enforce them
3) the loosey goosey anything goes stuff, forced into rank order by a protocol of every click requires a rating by the user before he or she gets to click again.
4) a way to say "this is what i'm interested in" so that blog writers can see it and respond to the need.

It's a hill climbing algorithm combined with setting the elevation levels to some range criteria with the delta being tracked.

For example. Flash 8 just came out. Say OSFlash had a Feed Spec 1.2 which covers all the interesting curent topics of interest to osflash7 users in a categorized set.

Now I create a list of topics that I'm interested in for promotion to the spec. Say Rectangle Object, Matrix Object, etc.

The editorial board says "yes these are new" and releases 1.3 with a set of flash8 specific categories for blog authors to focus on.

Someone who has just graduated and is looking for a chance to make a name for him or her self, scans the delta from 1.2 to 1.3 and see's what folk want to hear about. Writes some well done research on the topics that put them all in context, etc. and makes a mark for him or herself.


I'll look at both of these sites but I think that the key thing is that somebody needs to get paid (implicitly or explicitly) for the editorial role and that users need to spec what they want to hear about as well as contribute to the editorial process in some cases.

Thanks again for your thoughts

-Cort


On 10/3/05, John Dowdell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Cortlandt Winters wrote:
> Like many, I've gotten in the habit of looking at the mm news aggregator
> about once a day. It may be my imagination, but over the past year it has
> seems to have become more and more noisy, to the point where I'd really like
> to find a way of skimming out about 90 of the feeds and hopefully still get
> the small percentage that I find interesting.

I understand. I *like* having 500 similar feeds grouped together like
this, particularly for searching, but news-hunting has required more and
  more time over the last six months, and I fear I've been missing the
importance of some items due to the additional volume.

Have you seen digg.com? It's a recommendation system for any web
resource, not time-based listing of a smaller group of feeds like an
aggregator, but it's another way of hunting down the relevant news:
http://digg.com/faq

tech.memeorandum.com is another type of news-recommendation system, this
time starting with a pool of weblog authors and highlighting the links
the group has recently cited most often.

I don't think a Digg-like approach would match our own news-hunting
needs, and a Memeorandum-style engine can focus more on controversy than
information, but can you visualize other recommendation systems which
might be more appropriate for what we're trying to do...?

tx,
jd


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