One thing I'm getting more warped about these days is the idea of web trends.
There are quite a few sites I visit pretty regularly. Many of these sites don't have content of their own, but point to content in other places. Here is a short list of the types of places I'm talking about:
If you want to know what's going on online, these are the pages to read. There are a few other sites, but these are the ones I remember off the top of my head. They mostly differ in how they present things, but they basically perform similar functions.
Technorati and DayPop are examples of sites that track web trends. Basically, these sites scan the RSS feeds that other web sites publish. They sift through the links that the feeds contain, and use the link counts they find to produce a rating for the content topic.
For example, these sites can tell you that Air America Radio is a very popular topic on the web right now. (It is.) DayPop is nice because it shows you the change in the trend, whether it is waning or waxing. Technorati I find confusing, but it seems to have a more detailed algorithm in its "link cosmos" concoction.
Another type of site is that like Memepool or MetaFilter, which drive web trends. A group of people, either on a private list or open to the public, provide links to things on the web that seem interesting. Because of the popularity of the aggregating site, the sites that are referenced usually become known or popular. Many times, you can find out early about significant world or web happenings, somewhat prior to when they become widely known.
Some of these sites, particularly Slashdot, can even cause a wave of visitors so significant to hit a site that the site's software can't handle it. People on Slashdot use the verb form of the title, such as, "I tried to visit the site, but it was slashdotted." It almost seems like a goal for people at Slashdot to accomplish this, which is why I tend to avoid their news, which has a much higher noise level than other sites do.
Some of these sites offer community features. MetaFilter has a comment area. Memepool does not. But they both have IRC channels for people to discuss the topis that appear there.
Because of the nature of the link aggregators, it appears that they feel no need to include a community feature, since they are pulling their content from already written sources. Most of these aggregators provide links to sources, so you can find out who exactly is talking about Air America.
Another type of site is the pure RSS aggregator. These sites require a bit of user interaction, but can offer interesting detail in their information. BlogLines is a good example of this.
On BlogLines, you specify what sites you want to read, and it pulls the content together into one place using those site's RSS feeds. It lets you read all of the information in on place rather than hopping from site to site. An interesting feature that you get in BlogLines that you don't get with sofware (non-web) aggregators is that you can search through all of the subscribed feeds for a specific topic.
For example, I can search all of the BlogLines-gathered feeds for the term "astronomy". BlogLines will return a list of feeds that have used the word "astronomy" at least once. I can look through the feeds and add them to my BlogLines profile, and more importantly to the trend idea, I can see how many people are subscribed to that feed before I sign up, so I can tell how much other people value it.
I think that some unifying site needs to put all of these types of trend sites together. It would let people post about new and interesting things that they found online, let people discuss them in a thread-based context, find related blogs with similar or related content, post popularity indices for each topic and possibly a list of related content terms. By subscribing to certain "idea threads", the system could move things that intersted you more toward the top. Using a squelch knob of some kind, random elements could be added to the list to add diversity from the mainstream, or completely tune those things out for a more summarized view.
Somebody should construct such a thing...
