[melkjug-dev] Re: Melkjug Feedback

[Joshua Bronson]

Hey Tim,
Hm, yeah it sounds like he's misunderstanding the purpose here -- we're not
building a system specifically to facilitate discussion on blogs via
comments -- though he might know we have definitely played with and have by
no means abandoned the idea of a filter that promotes articles based on how
many comments they have (the tricky thing being normalizing based on average
traffic for the particular blog). In the meantime, it sounds like he may not
realize that most blogging software provides a separate feed for comments vs
blogposts? See for instance http://importantshock.wordpress.com/feed/ vs
http://importantshock.wordpress.com/2009/01/18/jquery-is-a-monad/feed/.

Anyway, thanks for the shout out to Melkjug and thanks for passing along the
feedback.

Josh

Josh,
One of the commenters on that blog I told you about responded to my post
about Melkjug. His tone is a little harsh, but may be good feedback.
And in due fairness I presented Melkjug as the wrong product.
In any case, here's the feedback, and a link to the thread (scroll down,
http://www.satisfice.com/blog/archives/224
--------------------------------------------------------
@Tim Coulter: Oy, what a name! “Melkjug”?
I score Melkjug as a clean miss. It’s still going with the blog-and-feed
system, which disregards comment as unimportant. That being so, Melkjug
fails at the most important part of this problem, which is to bubble up
a blog topic solely because there are new comments to it.
Melkjug (I did try it) doesn’t even show me the comments, and RSS
doesn’t flag new comments, even optionally, much less keep track of
which ones I’ve already read. Melkjug’s tuners do not offer the option,
“new comments” or “comment by a particular person”. “Starred by”, yes,
“Dugg by”, yes, but not “commented by”.
Y’all couldn’t add that if you wanted to because RSS (I include Atom
here) doesn’t present any information about the contents of comments at
all.
I have to remember to manually dial up this topic, because my reader
doesn’t pop up anything new until James writes another post. Then I have
to bring up the particular post in a view that includes comments (which
my reader’s view does not), and then scroll down the comments while
trying to recollect where I left off so I can see which, if any, are new
since my last visit.
I am going through that process this for this blog and this particular
subject, but I will not do it as a matter of course or for most blogs or
subjects. Neither will most people, and so the discussion dies, not from
lack of interest, but because the mechanics of keeping up with it are
just too cumbersome.

Hey Tim,
Melkjug for iPhone is one of our Medium Term Goals,
see

http://trac.openplans.org/melkjug/wiki/ProjectRoadmap#SimpleiPhoneApplication.
Glad to hear you'd find it useful.

Josh
I know I'm technically an OpenGeo guy, but I would love to
write a
melkjug iPhone app. And if that's too far, then I would just
love to
have one.
If it's swingable, count me in.
Tim
PS: I'm telling all my friends, regardless.

Hey TOPP,
It's time! Team Melkjug is ramping up efforts to get more

people

actively using melkjug.org, and we'd love your help. Please

take a

minute to post to your blog, facebook, twitter, delicious,

etc and

email any news fiends you know who might be interested in

giving it a

try. I know it will mean our facebook walls and twitter

inboxes will

all be flooded with one another's melkjug announcements, but

it could

make a huge difference in signups (consider it a direct
order strongly-encouraged request from cholmes and nickyg!).

The more

users we get signed up, reading, and starring articles on a

regular

basis, the better Melkjug will be at recommending articles

once we

launch the collaborative filtering service. Feel free to

copy and

paste the email below, or better yet, personalize it if you

have a

chance.
Thanks!
Josh
----
Hey! The non-profit I work for is building a web site I

thought you

might like. It's called melkjug.org, and the idea is to make

it easier

to read only the news that's interesting, rather than having

to weed

through the news that's not. If you have given up on reading

RSS due

to feed overload, then this is for you!
The way it works is you put in the news sources you check

regularly

(nytimes, the onion, perezhilton, etc), and it gathers the

news from

all the different sources into a single place. Then you can

add

customized tuners to turn the volume up or down on a

particular type

of article. For example, if all the articles about the

economic crisis

are giving you the recession blues, just create a tuner for

"Articles

tagged recession", turn down the volume, and the articles

that match

will disappear. Of course, you could crank it up to get the

opposite

effect. You can also see what your friends are reading, and

if you

like their taste, create a tuner to crank up articles

they've

starred. Tuners can filter based on a variety of criteria —

what source

an article came from, who wrote it, what it was tagged, and

when it

was published, to name a few—and more will be added as

people find

them useful. And since the project is open source, anyone

can use it

to build new tools we haven't thought of yet, and if we like

the ideas

we can incorporate them too.
Once enough people are using melkjug, it will be able to

provide you

with really accurate personalized recommendations, the same

way that

sites like Amazon and Netflix do, so it does the hard work

for you.

Check it out at melkjug.org, and pass it along to anyone

else you know

who might be interested.
Thanks!