Polymath's Guide to News and Ideas

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FAQ

How do you find buzz?

We have a database of about 25,000 leading blogs covering specific topics — economics, architecture, media, and so on. Every few hours our unique buzz-detection system analyzes each topical cluster and determines what are some of the "hottest" articles — be they from the traditional media or other blogs — discussed by the blogs in our cluster. We then republish the most interesting of them on Polymeme.com, displaying the sources that are talking about each "hot" news article or blog post. We believe that relying on this "wisdom of clusters" and not just "wisdom of crowds" provides for superior buzz detection than most regular buzz-aggregators, which usually give preference to most popular stories across all topics, and not most interesting ones in specific areas.

The number of links to some memes keep changing — why?

Don't panic, nobody is perfect – as we have to confront spam, the number of links to some news items always keeps changing, as the spam and duplicate results get removed.

How can I keep track of all memes on your site?

There are several ways to do this. You can subscribe to memes from particular sections in your RSS reader (you can also choose to receive them by email) or you can create your own RSS feed by subscribing only to specific feeds under MyPolymeme. Alternatively, you can just come and browse every day — our Inbox sidebar would always show the number of the new memes in each section for the last 24 hours and you can use it to navigate through the newly published memes.

Doesn't Polymeme help to increase the echo chamber effect?

Yes and no. We are certainly limited by the 25,000 blogs that we have in our database; yet, we are constantly expanding it to include new topical blogs that have just appeared — we have done our best to include all topical blogs we could find. We also understand that by identifying and amplifying some of these discussions we invariably spur even more discussions about the same issues; yet, we think there is a tremendous value to it, since this is how ideas propagate.

Aren't you destroying traditional media by aggregating links to their articles?

No, we aren't — quite the opposite, we help the most interesting articles from the traditional media to be discovered by a wider audience.

Why can't I find anything about iPhone or Barack Obama on your site?

If you try hard enough, you probably would, but we do try to cover areas that are traditionally not well covered by other mainstream meme-trackers and aggregators. Thus, for example, we have made a strategic decision not to cover technology or American politics per se; you would probably still see a lot of news items about American politics on our site, but it will be primarily presented through the lens of economics, education, law or environment, not sheer ideology. Same applies to our coverage of technology: we would happily cover it when it comes to new ways to read books or save energy or publish a newspaper, but we wouldn't cover technology for technology's sake — there are other great meme-trackers that do it.

Don't you break some copyright laws?

We think we don't, but let us know if you think otherwise (info[at]polymeme.com) We don't republish full text feeds, even if they are available, and we always link to the original source.

How do you make money?

Right now, we don't, but we hope to in the future -- let us know if you know how :-)

And who's a polymath?

Ouch, we thought you knew...Well, we like Susan Sontag's definition: "To be a polymath is to be interested in everything -- and nothing else". And for "who's Susan Sontag?" please see Wikipedia :-)

Why am I getting "You are not authorized to access this page" error?

Some parts of our site are meant to be personalized, that's why we are asking people to create their own accounts. Setting up an account gives one access to the MyPolymeme section which is a personal aggregator built on Polymeme technology. Opening an account is free and takes only 15-20 seconds for most people :-)

Are you using Gmail, Blogspot, Livejournal, Flickr (or any other Yahoo! service), AOL/AIM or other OpenID-friendly services? Then you don't have to create a username and you can log in right away! Please see below for instructions how to do it.

How to log in with OpenID?

Make sure you input the whole OpenID login in the "name" field. It should look as follows in most cases: httр://username.myopenidhost.com (including http:// part). For Livejournal accounts, for example, it is httр://username.livejournal.com.
Please note that Gmail/Blogspot users have to activate their OpenID sign-ons first!

If you're still having problems, please refer to your OpenID issuing company's help docs or knowledge base, here are a few links:

What is myPolymeme? Why do I need it?

MyPolymeme is a tool that lets you choose your own topics of interest from the 20 areas that are currently featured on the site. We do hope that you will appreciate our editors' efforts too and visit our front page from time to time where they work hard to combine serendipity with focus :-)

What are the technologies used on Polymeme?

Here at Polymeme, we try to use as much open source tools as possible. This site is built on Drupal 5 running on Ubuntu serving files with nginx coupled with Apache.

Much of the coding was done using Geany and Aptana and the good old Notepad.

Additional analytical capabilities of our Polybuzz section are provided by the wonderful Reuters OpenCalais semantic analysis system, while OpenID authentication technology, mentioned above, lets users of other services, such as Bloglines, AIM, Gmail, etc, use Polymeme personalization without registering.