Today I learned a valuable thing about computer, networking, and Internet security.  I mean, I don’t know the first things about such things, but it turns out that you *don’t* actually need fancy certifications, experience, or even have something workable to defend your computer intra-networked-webs.

All you need is *LOVE*, man. ;)

Well, that’s what I’m getting out of the latest major critical outage at Skype (disclosure: I haven’t had any noticeable problems over the past day or so).  I mean when I read such things as “the Skype system has not crashed or been victim of a cyber attack. We love our customers too much to let that happen“, on the official Skype Blog, what else am I supposed to think?

That perhaps Skype customers — businesses and regular customers — deserve some kind of “real” answer that is free from glib, patronizing, corporate-blog-speak?  That perhaps a service that many have come to depend on, and perhaps have now lost *money* from, ought to provide a sincere — and I mean, really sincere — explanation that satisfies both laypeople and experts alike?

NAaaaaah.

I guess that’s too much to ask.

“Things I Like” is a new quickie column to be published on a frequency that will charitably described as irregular, based on, you guessed it, things I like.  You could say it is a kind of “review” type post, if you want.

That being said and out of the way, its funny what you find when you’re dredging through your web analytics.  The other day, someone pinged me through a service called AideRSS, so I checked it out.  Its kind of interesting, and the first “Thing” I’d like to write about for “Things I Like”.

AideRSS is a feed reader that tries to make sense out out your feeds.  It basically sorts them out according to a “popularity” index, called “PostRank” that is based on a few variables, but they include things like number of diggs, bookmarks on del.icio.us, and the number of comments it has.  The exact weighting of said variables, and the total number of said variables, aren’t quite available for public consumption, but you get the idea.

Having this algorithm is kind of interesting, because it can sort all of your posts in all of your feeds according to this PostRank, which, incidentally, gives each post a score out of 10.0.  You can generate a list of the best feeds, the best posts, or what have you.

The problem with AideRSS, however, is that because PostRank is directly related to popularity, what you will find is that it disproportionately weights really popular blogs or news sites against those that aren’t intrinsically popular.  This is because irrespective of how “good” any one post is on, say, LifeHacker, because it is a generally popular site, it will get more inbound links, more comments, more Digg, and more bookmarks than another blog, all things being equal.

The real chestnut that I’m trying to describe is that just because something isn’t popular doesn’t mean its not good.  Or, just because something *is* popular, doesn’t mean it *is* good.

What would make a tool like AideRSS even better is having a way of comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges.  Amongst sites with a certain traffic level, for example, *this* is what the best posts are.  Without having such an arrangement, trying to filter posts becomes an interesting, albeit it, elitest, exercise.

In general, I am all for putting information in appropriate *context*, and I am on the “future of the interwebs is making sense of information overload” bandwagon.  AideRSS is an interesting tool that will help you tame your feeds, but I think there are a few things it can do to make it even better.

[Another thing I like?  Its Canadian. :) ]

It must be hard for a professional blogger like Robert Scoble.  Working fairly flexible hours, getting to write about, shoot video about, and otherwise co-mingle and hob-nob in, a field you love, all the while getting paid for it.  Now, I’m trying not to sound as cranky, cantankerous, jaded and jaundiced, as I probably do, but I’m failing.  Robert Scoble is taking another break from blogging because he’s gotten disillusioned from the seeming triviality of it all.

Well, boo freakin’ hoo.

I think that its up to all of us to find meaning in whatever industry, field, or way of life we happen to participate in.  For some of us, its easy to do, and for others a little harder.  Professional blogging is no different.  You have to acknowledge there are going to be times when you’ll be dealing with the unimportant, the seemingly trivial, and its up to you (and all of us, really, in whatever we do), to remind ourselves of why we’re doing what we’re doing in the first place.

And if you’ve forgotten or can’t remember why its important, maybe — *maybe* — you should stop and ask yourself why you’re doing it in the first place.

Now, perhaps Robert *is* doing this in favour of some other endeavor, but the cynic in me says that this “break” will probably be like a few others he’s taken over the past few years, in that it will last a few days, and where he’ll be back blogging before we all know it.

If you’re wondering what Scott Karp, uber-smart new media blogger at publishing2.com, has been up to (well, I have — but that tells you the extent of what my life is like at the moment) is launching a new service this fall called Publish2.com. You can read the 2800 word treatise on what its about over here, but it sounds like, Publish2 is “a social network and 2.0 platform for journalists (and independent “news bloggers,” “citizen” journalists, student journalists, i.e. ALL journalists, BROADLY defined), which aims to put journalists at the center of news aggregation on the web.”

This is going to be one of those situations where I’m just going to have to see what the final product is about, because although I *think* I know what Scott is describing, that actual summary above, I don’t think, actually gets at the heart of what publish2 is about, which are, it sounds like at least two important things.

Social News With A Twist:
From what I understand, Scott is going to be creating a news aggregator like service which is powered by journalists. Unlike Digg (which he references liberally, and with good reason), or other social news sites, Publish2 will not be powered by the wisdom of the plebs. It will be powered by journalists, who Scott feels are actually the best people to do the filtering as, well, its pretty much their job. As for who counts as a journalist, this is pretty broadly defined, but it sounds like there will be an initial coterie of them (as defined by Scott, Robert Young, and others) [if you'd like to be part of that coterie, you may apply over here], who then get invites to people *they* think count as journalists.

So, does this sound elitest?

Well, of course it does, and Scott admits that this is so. Better yet, should you care? I think, as with all things in life, the proof of the pudding is in the tasting. And that is, you should only care if the outcome, the socially bookmarked news, of Publish2 is good.

Cool.

Noteworthy.

Good-at-finding-things-that-non-journalists-would-love-to-read -but-don’t-already-find-them-in-their-or-news-sites.

One issue that I wonder how Scott is going to get around, however, is achieving a critical level of quality through numbers. While the “crowd” that sorts through the news is going to be journalists, with Digg like news you do need a critical level of people submitting news to get a diverse (and “good”) selection of news.

Which brings me to what I think Publish2 will *also* be about

Bringing Journalists Into Social Media:
Its unclear if blogging per se will be part of these tools so far, but it looks like there will be supportive tools, technologies, forums, group hugs and so on (perhaps the latter is done virtually). Scott thinks that there is a niche for this, and this very well may be the case, as Scott is in a good position to comment on the state of journalism and new media, what with his work at Atlantic Media in the past, and, of course his own blog. Bringing known quantities into the mix will help as well, as he’s brought perennial new media media wag, “il professore“, Jeff Jarvis, along for the mix.

Ultimately the second of these things will feed into the first of those things, and I think that it will be Scott’s greatest challenge to not only to gather and evangelize social media and *blogging* to journalists, but to get them to actually participate on this specific platform at this time. He’s got to create something so compelling and so cool — to *journalists* — that they will want to join, and pull that social media engine to churn out all that bookmarked, socially driven goodness.

… and whatever the output of that engine is, that people — laypeople (the plebs) — will find it interesting enough to come back.

Some time ago, I read that social news was attempted by some news organization with mixed results (someone furnish me with a reference). People submitted stuff they liked, but by and large, it only included explosions, car crashes, and babes in bikinis. Or all three.

I think I know and understand what Scott is trying to get at. I like the idea of *elevating* the idea of crowdsourced news by targeting a very narrow band of people. What I do wonder, however, is if the tastes of this admittedly elite few will find a broad enough niche to satisfy the tastes of the many — and if it doesn’t, will having a place for journalists in and itself be enough?