Last night I was at a PHP meetup – a monthly meeting of people interested in PHP, the programming language I use for the websites at work.
Just talking, I came up with a great idea.
I subscribe to dozens of blogs relating to work, my friends, my interests, ect. This means I average 125 new posts in my news reader a day. A lot of these are duplicates between different blogs that cover the same sector. It’s not uncommon for me to see 2-3 or even up to half a dozen nearly exact blog posts on a given topic.
It would be great if Google Reader could aggregate or consolidate these similar articles into a single or a set of articles.
My thoughts would be to a single article up to twice, once, the original article, and the second would be the best discussion of that original article. How to determine ‘best’ would be hard. Maybe a volume normalized look at digg, reddit, del.icio.us, technorati and the other social sites to see which discussion article gets the most interest. Maybe based on the number of comments a discussion generates?
Maybe only give me the ones that are significantly different?
I don’t really know what would be useful.
I do think that all blogs in a single label should be aggregated somehow so you only see unique posts.
Oh, also the National Geographic and Scientific American RSS feeds must be broken or something as I keep getting the exact same post repeatedly. Very annoying. This type of system would cure that problem too.
I was thinking of seeing if I can put something together in Yahoo Pipes.
I don’t know if this type of idea would be useful to any of you?
