Large pieces, tightly fused 

Dave's post about centralizing things on the web rang true to me and my hippie web sensibilities. The whole small-pieces-loosely-joined thing really is what the web in all its glory is all about. Most any kind of portal fights against the grain of the web's nicest, most important, and most defining property.

I get what he means about Techmeme and the way ambitious bloggers glom onto the newest thread, contributing no more new info than what was contained in the post from a news magazine.

Everybody mentions the echo chamber, but it's so true. Yesterday's Techmeme was all over the new Amazon ebook reader, but I didn't see anything from David Rothman, who's been following its development for years, and writes the ebooks blog. How is it his TeleRead blog is not represented, but dozens of bloggers who have never written about ebooks are preferred? (Could be he's on the list, don't hold me to saying he's not. I don't check TM more than a couple times a week and don't claim to have studied all its patterns.)

The other thing that drives me nuts are posts by marketing types who only skim along the top of tech concepts. They're often great evangelists because that's what they're trained to be. They tend to keep it all lofty and high-level and meta, and make vagueness a virtue. In many cases not going into detail is also a necessity.

My posts made it to TM a couple of times, then no more. It's been more than a year I think. Shelley says she was taken off the Techmeme whitelist. (Oooh! Nice what's she's doing to her site, again.) I think that's what must have happened to me. The Al Gore Rhythm snuck me on, but somebody decided it was a fluke and I didn't really qualify for club membership for whatever reason. Just guessing.

Gabe Rivera deserves a lot of credit for coming up with the idea for Techmeme. It could be there's room for him or somebody else to specialize the concept. Buzztracker, recently acquired by Yahoo, does somehing like this. Have several whitelists for narrower topics so that somebody with little knowledge or interest in a thing doesn't get a louder voice than somebody who's made it their life's work.

It's related to an idea I had for a specialized news aggregator site a few months ago. I pipedreamed a place where sources would be chosen even more specifically, organized around big top stories that would appear and be retired (which is the nature of news), not just topics that wouldn't change over time.

But that would be a portal, too, wouldn't it? I suppose I wish it was possible for there to be a People's portal operated by folks who really don't give a rat's ass if the site is ever visited except to copy feed links and grab widgets and other means of consuming the information elsewhere. Maybe it's not that portals by definition are the culprit, but their motivation -- the thirst for eyeballs that bulks up and tightens the pieces, and spoils the early promise of the web.

We're getting there, but slowly 

It wasn't so long ago that organization websites made it a policy to open outbound links in a new window. That doesn't happen as much anymore, thank goodness. Maybe we'll get to the point, slower than we'd wish, where eyeballs don't rule. But while advertising is the dominant way to make the web pay it's a battle of desires. Hate to be the one to tell you but I think for the moment commercial interests are winning the tug-of-war with users. You know what's funny? In that way the web is becoming just like TV, just like we tried to tell the agencies 10 years ago it wasn't.