I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Techmeme. It’s very useful for days when you haven’t got time to read through your RSS subscriptions (viz. most days) and just want a snapshot of what the techies in the blogosphere are talking about.
On the other hand, it tends to focus very heavily on the supposed A-listers and Silicon Valley gossip. Forgive me, but I am not too interested in what Jason Calacanis said about Nick Denton’s shoes at Michael Arrington’s barbecue. What they ought to do, I reckon, is throw out their existing reading list and use mine instead.
That idea might not fly in some circles. So that’s why I am very interested in Megite. The opening page looks much the same as Techmeme or Tailrank. But they seem to have a wider spread of sites monitored and there are a large number of subsections that allow you to focus in on topics from food to finance. The fun bit is ‘My Megite’. Basically, you email the guy — Matthew Chen — your OPML file and he’ll create a personalised page for you. [Not-so-techies: your OPML file is a list of all the feeds you subscribe to. You can export it from your news reader site or program.] Here’s the personalised page for the Search Engine Watch blog. I’ll post mine when I hear back from Matthew. (see below)
There’s not too much more information available, but it appears that the business model of the site is to license their engine to organisations. This sounds like a great idea: staying on top of the news in some industries must be a nightmare with dozens of sites and blogs to visit. Sphere, Icerocket and Technorati searches are OK, but don’t do a great job of organising the information that emerges. Good luck to them, I say, though they may need to find a slightly more elegant way of uploading OPMLs if the service takes off.
Update: Matthew is clearly working very hard. He came back to me with a link to my personal megite within two hours of this post. He also explains that there will be an online form for processing OPML files when they have secured enough resources to ensure that the server doesn’t fall over when lots of processes are submitted at the same time. Matthew points out that a link to an online OPML is better for these personalised pages because then they can keep it live when your subscriptions change. Oh, and they have a blog.
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Ian — i agree with your positive comments about Megite. It’s one of the first things I check each day, and I don’t understand completely what’s going on. I just know that what shows up in MY MEGITE (http://www.megite.com/index.php?section=ddmcd) as new and a connected item often turns out to be useful, and it’s a LOT easier than scanning through all the new items in my Google Reader. I am looking forward to being able to update my OPML file myself, though.
It’s great, isn’t it? The ideal thing would be to use it in conjunction with Newsgator. Apparently, that will publish a “live” OPML file that Megite can then process.
Unfortunately, the free Newsgator won’t import my Google Reader OPML, though, so I need to export from Google and post it on this site when I update in order for My Megite to know about the new feeds.
It is indeed very cool indeed. I’m completely with you on Techmeme — which I like but it’s less useful because of the bias.
[…] Twopointouch writes about Megite: My Mate Megite. Ian Delaney sent us his OPML file and we created a personal Megite for him. It would be better if you can send us the link to your public available opml file, then Megite can pick up the changes in case you edit your reading list. […]