Feevy: Aggregating Distributed Conversations

More interesting stuff from Feevy: http://wannabepresidents.com

This site is an aggregation of excerpts from the blogs of America's presidential candidates. Here you can see the distributed conversation (and debate) about America's near future all in one place, so instead of navigating across many blogs, finding links, or using a feed reader, you can quickly scan the most recent activity on the candidate's blogs--and unlike any of those other options, on wannabepresidents.com you might also discover voices and ideas you didn't know you needed to hear and that you might never hear otherwise.

This is an especially good example of the value of blog aggregation, because the conversation is discrete, the participants are from a defined group. There are lots of topics in common--and the participants, let's just say, aren't as good about linking to each other as you might hope.

This site is also an example of how the person creating the aggregation influences the conversation. And here's where this gets interesting. By including the voices of obscure and third-party candidates alongside those of the big-party main contenders, the site is decidedly a political statement in and of itself. This is powerful stuff: "Outsider" voices are presented side-by-side with "mainstream" voices. Dare I say this is a kind of democratization? Brought about technologically? On the Internet?

Any site with an XML feed can be aggregated. An interesting example of a non-blog aggregation is at www.popurls.com, which aggregates social bookmarking and media sharing sites to produce a picture of web buzz from across many sites. You could call popurls a meta-aggregator, if you couldn't stop yourself from saying "meta."

John Goad does something similar on his Internet marketing "re-blog," but with an editorial selection process rather than dynamic feeds.

Blog aggregations are nothing new. What's new is the greater ease of assembling one. Feevy represents another step toward a time when it'll be as easy to aggregate blogs as it is to start a blog. And that has the potential to add a new kind of conversation to the mix: the blog as dinner party, the blog as wedding table, the blog as trapped-in-the-elevator, the blog as discussion panel, the blog as debate.

You could aggregate the blogs of people who might not even be on speaking terms. Think of the fun!

There are lots of aggregations that would be just plain cool:

• Has-been boy band blogs (would it be possible to graphically display their despair, their nostalgia?)
• Flamboyant government official blogs from around the world (Feevy's already done one for Spanish representatives at http://www.parlamentarios.info/)
• Self-professed online community expert blogs (sign me up!)
• Family and friend blogs

Similarly, there are applications for business:

• Blogs from individuals on a product team that wants to provide a consolidated customer-facing voice
• Internal-facing blogs of company leaders
• Companies wanting to put forward a thought-leadership marketing presence
• Tracking of influencer blogs across the business space

We're working on something along the thought-leadership lines at ZAAZ (my employer), and we've done some interesting client work recently that pulls together a number of individual employee blogs into a sort of hybrid meta-blog (there I go again) / blog aggregation.

So, soon we'll see, if not an explosion, then a flowering, of aggregators as the technological barriers of entry come down. Remixing and assembling bits and pieces of the distributed conversion will provide new views into issues and trends, new ways of seeing individual voices as part of something larger, and new ways to customize your own view of the Web.

Comments

[david silver]

ryan - nice post.

you make two excellent points:

1. "This is an especially good example of the value of blog aggregation, because the conversation is discrete, the participants are from a defined group."

yes. exactly. naturally, there's all kinds of models for aggregation but i think you pinpointed two important elements: conversation is discrete and audience is defined.

2. "This site is also an example of how the person creating the aggregation influences the conversation ... By including the voices of obscure and third-party candidates alongside those of the big-party main contenders, the site is decidedly a political statement in and of itself."

hee hee, what, me political?!? =)

in some ways, what david and i were trying to do with wanna be presidents is precisely the opposite of what the national televised debates do. the tv debates include just the major candidates (remember "let ralph debate"?), leaving less mainstream (and often more intelligent) voices behind. we tried to bring all the voices together on a level playing field/screen.

i like hearing your visions for future uses of blog aggregators and will look forward to seeing them in pixels.

[Ryan]

Thanks David. I'm super excited about the concept of assembling virtual panels around important topics.

It's not hard to imagine a drag-and-drop aggregation-assembler. No doubt David of Feevy is already working on it.