Polymath's Guide to News and Ideas
Polymeme.com goes live!
We are glad to finally announce the soft launch of polymeme.com, an innovative news aggregator that has kept us busy for the last few months.
Over the years of following the English-language blogosphere, we have become increasingly frustrated with the absence of news aggregators that could help us stay on top of important developments in non-tech areas. Fields like economics, design, law, environment, or literature didn't seem to have their own Digg, Techmeme or Technorati; thus, navigating through the growing non-tech blogospheres has become very difficult. As the amount of information on the Web has kept growing rapidly, it has proved almost impossible to become and stay a true polymath, i.e. be continuously well-informed about many fields, not just one.
So we decided to build such an aggregator for our own use -- but also decided to share it with others. After a few months of intense experiments, we are proud to point you to polymeme.com, a meme-tracker designed to turn you into a true polymath. What makes it stand out from other aggregators is its unique approach to determining what's important. Polymeme crawls topical clusters of blogs -- for example, we have about 2,700 blogs in our books & poetry cluster and more than 2,000 blogs in our architecure & design cluster -- to determine what are the most talked-about articles in each (we track a total of 25,000 blogs). In a sense, Polymeme leverages the expertise of experts who blog-- economists, lawyers, scientsts-- to discover articles that truly matter.
More topics
About a week ago our reader Chris told us that he missed being able to browse by specific topic right from the frontpage (as did a few other anonymous commenters on the site). We thought about it for a while, did the coding, and finally it is up on the site for everyone to use an enjoy → the fabulous "Choose Topic" button (pictured right)! Now, each of the 20 topics featured on the site is one click away, and, in fact, we'll add a few more topics in due time.
You may notice an additional link in the topic menu that says "Other topics & keyword search". If it seems out of place, let us explain why it is there. The link points to our search page which is much more than a simple search page. It allows to search for things that aren't explicitly categorized on the site, but might be interesting for researchers and thoughtful readers, and allows to subscribe to search results via RSS feeds. For instance, one can search for "education technology", "racism"(which we do not endorse) or "mobile technology" and receive updates each time a story about this subject appears on Polymeme.
P.S. you may have noticed that the dropdown menu has been inspired by the 37signals Basecamp Project Switcher - we are using Basecamp to manage out projects and we love it!
What's new at Polymeme: continued
As you may have already noticed, we have — belatedly, as some of you might say — embraced the principle that less is more. You can already see it in our new cleaner and slicker design. We will also be slightly decreasing the total # of items we publish daily but we'll try to increase their relevance, breadth, and scope. Also, to make Polymeme more appealing, the vast majority of memes we run would have Flickr-based photos to accompany them.
Our initial 20 sections are still with us, they are now just a bit less obvious: after all, we are after the true polymaths, who'd rather read the most important news from all 20 sections on the front page (it's also quite likely that we would be expanding beyond the initial 20 sections and include memes from an even wider assortment of topics). Also, to avoid the culture of "enclaves" within our community, from now on we'll be publishing ALL news that we used to publish to sections-only to the front page. Thus, the front page becomes the central marketplace for all ideas traded on Polymeme.
The most interesting items would appear in the featured spots and the header; everything else would be in chronological order. This means that our editors would need to work even harder to present you with the news and ideas that matter in the global/polymath context &mdash and not just anything that's buzz-worthy.
We have also finally embraced some basic moves towards community features. The very first basic step that we have made is making it easier for you to comment on "memes". We are also planning more community-based features to take full advantage of our intelligent audience and their news-smarts. Stay tuned for news about that direction.
The new Polymeme is online!
Polymeme has a new design, and behind the scenes almost every aspect has been rewritten and rechecked, made faster, lighter and more seamless to use. We think it's easier on the eyes too.
We've tried to address all concerns that you wrote to us about: the smallish text fonts, dark colors, unusual green links, unnecessary complications with login etc. We've also added useful information on the FAQ and about pages and more.
By the way, URLs of all sections and informational pages have been kept the same, so you won't have to update bookmarks or change your habits.
We hope you like the changes. If there are any issues or if you think old design was better — please write to us. As always, we are around pretty much 24/7 and will try to fix problems once you let us know.
There will be more pictures on this new Polymeme and we hope you'll like what you see. Please be advised that commenting on items is open now, smart remarks are waiting to be made there.
More new features are in progress, and soon all Polymeme users will get their accounts upgraded in functionality. Yet, we will try to keep all extra features simple and unobtrusive so that Polymeme stays clutter-free. Thank you for being with us!