This is an open project. Based on sharing (of rss-feeds, primarely). I do have a list of all the things infoclan.nl should do, be or promise. But why not ask you, the users and true inhabitants of infoclan.
Please comment.
Or mail me at infoclan at infoclan dot nl.
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I started Infoclan as a blog, some time ago. Then I lost the inspiration needed for blogging, until now. Infoclan is live, in a very early beta. There are users and people who took the trouble of uploading an opml-file. As a result of that Infoclan started to aggregate rss-feeds, with just one goal: I’d like to know what other bloggers my bloggers are reading.
Almost every day I spend an hour or so to read blogs, a little over a hundred. The blogs op mediapeople like Jeff Jarvis, Nick Carr and Kevin Kelly are more important to me than my daily pack of three morning newspapers (Dagblad van het Noorden, de Volkskrant, NRC Next). My guess is that Jarvis, Carr and Kelly read blogs just like I do: in a feed reader, like Google Reader.
Their choice of blogs and especially their choice of bloggers (one-man-outfits in stead of groupblogs or corporate blogs) should be a goldmine. It’s like browsing their bookshelfs, it’s like getting their advice on what we should do with our lives, it’s a way to get their brains - or a small part of it - wired.
I know that a thing like infoclan had been tried before. The legendary Dave Winer, who invented rss, built a site to share opml-feeds. In these days nobody knew where to find these files with rss-feeds, nor what we should do with them. At the end Winer had a few thousand bloggers that were waiting for him to do something smart - and then closed down his site.
Toluu is another one. It’s more ambitious; they actually hired a designer. At Toluu you can upload your opml-file, just like at this site. But these guys in the US got it wrong. Toluu is another social network. Toluu tells you what other bloggers your friends are reading. But my friends are just as dumb as me.
I don’t want the next hype in blogging. You should not tell me who is going to be famous - if it’s that important, the news will find me. I don’t need another entree to mass media, but some kind of aggregated specialist advice.
So what’s the algorithm in Infoclan? I can’t tell you (I’d like to joke that my biggest mistake, and old media’s biggest mistake, is that we didn’t invent Google when it was so obvious that someone should). But actually, the algorithm is extremely simple. It just counts. Now - it will get smarter along the way.
How? Some examples. The more people read a blogger, the more valuable the list of this blogger probably is. That’s of course the first rule of PageRank, the algorithm behind Google Search. But PageRank itself could also be a part of Infoclan (the higher my pagerank, the more valuable my rsss-list). And sure, you could that also with Technorati.
What are my wishes?
Someone should clean up my lousy programming (but that can wait). Most of all I need a way to distinguish bloggers from groupblogs and corporate blogs. There’s a difference between the tech-columnist of The New York Times and Nick Carr, who is a one-man-band, gifted writer and acclaimed pain-in-the-ass for internetlovers.
For Infoclan a blogger is more valuable then a corporate blog of groupblog. I want to be connected to a brain, not to a data storage room. The media are getting more and more personal. We don’t read newspapers anymore - not like we used to do - but we do read people. Writers, journalists, columnists, bloggers.