by Flemming Funch
Philippe Beaudoin has some good thoughts about weblogs as meta search engines. Rather than just directly looking for information within all the information in the world, a weblog makes certain indirect factors much more important, and it makes it more potentially useful to go off on a tangent. If you find a story that you think is important and useful on somebody's weblog, chances are that you would like other things in the same weblog, even if they are on totally different topics, and chances are good that you will like the stuff on other weblogs that this person is recommending. Automated tools might take that into consideration. For example, an approach similar to Google's PageRank might allow you to assign a value to a certain weblog, and automatically it will rub off on weblogs that are related to that one. That will enable you to better navigate a network of weblogs that is likely to give you stuff you want. And it opens the door to more productive randomness. That is something I like pursuing as well - intelligent randomness, increasing the occurrence of synchronicity. It is often stimulating to be thrown off a bit in a direction different from what you would expect, but only if some pre-selection has taken place. Most of the 100,000 weblogs are quite uninteresting to me, but I'd like to be exposed to unexpected stuff at the edge of what I'm aware of. A friend of a friend whom I don't know yet.
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