Stephen’s Statements A little bit of everything from Stephen Duncan Jr, a Software Developer in Portland, Oregon

Despite my misuse of the term in this post, I don’t frequently participate in “memes”. But this one from Jason seems like a good one. Basically, I selected adjectives describing my personality traits, and now you will select them too, and we can compare the overlap or lack thereof. Without further ado, here’s the more-or-less positive list, and here is the mostly negative list. Please take the time to fill it out if you know me, as the number of synonyms requires a large sample size to get any useful aggregation of results…

Scoble asks Why don’t you use a memetracker?. Check out the comments, as I agree with most of the answers. Summary: not enough new stuff, not a useful format, and, finally, why would I?

What would a useful “Memetracker” look like? First, it will have to integrate with my feed-reader/aggregator (do we have a single agreed upon name for this yet?) data. That way you can exclude the stuff I already know about. Plus you could tailor it to be interesting to me. Bloglines could pull this off, as could any other aggregator that centrally stores feed-reading data. Or, if attention or some other feed-reading-data-sharing mechanism were available, it could be done by a third party.

Second, it would be provided primarily as another feed. Not having to go out to another website and hitting refresh over-and-over is exactly the reason we love RSS and Atom so much.

So, what I’d want is an Atom feed of new items that I have neither read yet, nor have I read anything that linked to it yet. I want to see a summary of the main content, and possibly some links to the most interesting commentary on the item. An algorithm to determine interestingness like Flickr does would be the killer feature. A combination of popularity and making sure it includes some significant commentary instead of just being a another quote-and-link would be a good starting point. And, of course, I want “interestingness” to be somewhat based on what I already read, so that I can get more Java and less Microsoft, more economics and constitutional law and less party politics, and soccer and basketball, instead of just technology and politics.

Google is starting to integrate its Google Talk application with Gmail. Right now it’s just the ability to centrally store your chat logs, but it promises web-based chat to come. I’m excited!