50,000 posts an hour and a new blog each second

This post about the astounding growth of the blogosphere really is worth the read.

We track about 1.2 Million posts each day, which means that there are about 50,000 posts each hour. At that rate, it is literally impossible to read everything that is relevant to an issue or subject, and a new challenge has presented itself – how to make sense out of this monstrous conversation, and how to find the most interesting and authoritative information out there.

reBlogger has pretty much nailed removing the noise, leaving only signal. Yay! But this is what keeps me awake and churning over with ideas: how to make sense out of so much useful information. With so much GOOD information out there, how to order it and present it in a useful way.

Let me digress for a moment: It's the classic competition between Yahoo and Google for search.

Google is taking the algorythm approach. They throw thousands of CPUs at the problem and make their algo's stronger and better – in the attempt to find relevance. They invest into data crunching. More money. More smarts. More employees.

Yahoo is taking the community approach. They buy del.ico.us and flikr and just about anything which has either a) content or b) tags and tagging by people. The content is valuable to Yahoo as it pushes AOL of it's pedestal. The tagging is useful for their search engine to evaluate what REAL PEOPLE think is relevant.

Now let me return to the post topic… with so much GOOD information out there, how to order it and present it in a useful way. Technorati has the $ to index 27.2 million blogs, they are the Google. We will take the Yahoo approach and create innovative ways for our users to express themselves, to tag their world, to explore the mountain of information out there and to find the gem they need.

It's an exciting task. With reBlogger we have managed to exclude the noise, leaving only the signal – now we need to enhance the ability to find the gems hidden in this morass of information.

FeedFlare – building longevity into blog posts

I just saw this: FeedFlare from FeedBurner. If you've read my other posts about the need to see a blogger's posts as his/her property, even years after they have left their website and have been duplicated thousands of times, then you might see why I think FeedFlare is the next logical step for the longevity of blog posts.

What business problem does it solve?

FeedFlare changes the dynamic of how users interact with an RSS feed. Rather than just read content from a feed, subscribers can now take direct actions, such as being able to forward or save an item. In addition, publishers have long needed a way to tie their feed content back to their Web site, creating more of a community while maintaining a constant thread and connection to their content throughout syndication.

Why couldn't I have put it so well? 🙂

I think that 'bulking up' posts, injecting smarts directly into the post – regardless of the website which is displaying the post (ensuring the revenue of the post always goes back to the creator, for example) is very important. FeedFlare bulks up the posts and builds into them features which keep a tenuous link between the creator and their creation.

The reason this is important to me is that reBlogger make copies of content and it's tremendously important to me that the author, the creator, can still track, claim and benefit from their creation.