Polymeme Team Blog

Polymeme is hiring: editorial and tech positions now open

gleb — Thu, 02 Oct 2008 16:03:21 -0400

Our team is expanding and we need help with editorial and Drupal development tasks.

If you are interested in helping us out with various editorial assignments, we'd love to hear from you.

In addition, we are looking for a Drupal developer intern keen on developing new modules and working on cool experimental Drupal features. Right now, we are working on a package of tools and modules that will be useful for setting up a newsroom interface on online magazine sites, e.g. quick editing/publishing module, editing queue, and others. In addition, we are working to devise meme-tracking and analytical tools around the FeedAPI module and OpenCalais. The work will be released to the community after completion. More interesting projects are on the way, this is just the beginning!

If any of the above sounds interesting, please drop us a line at info@polymeme.com.

Talk to Polymeme, hear it Tweet back

dan — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 17:58:39 -0400

Almost two weeks passed since we introduced the new design and we got enough positive feedback to feel confident it was a move in the right direction.

Of course we did not get any chance to sit back and relax or go on vacation, but worked around the clock to finish off all the inconsistencies, the remaining bugs and answer each and every email we received from you.

On top of that we are working on improving the meme detection mechanisms and a few exciting new features that will be rolled out soon. Today we are happy to announce that you can follow us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/polymemedotcom)

Since we are always interested in meeting our readers face to face (sorry about the pun), you can also join our Facebook Group and participate in discussions, write on the walls, post screenshots of bugs or just drop by to say Hi! :-)

What's new at Polymeme: continued

polymeme — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 10:23:05 -0400

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!

gleb — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:19:33 -0400

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!

Announcement: Polymeme upgrade in progress

polymeme — Sun, 31 Aug 2008 13:14:10 -0400

Dear polymaths,
we are upgrading Polymeme and moving to a new server.
The updates will be slower while we make the changes, but we should be fully open for business tomorrow (Monday) morning.

Thank you for your understanding!

Other aggregators that inspired us

evgeny.morozov — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 06:06:32 -0400

some of the sites that inspired us and influenced our thinking while building polymeme:

http://www.buzzfeed.com
http://www.techmeme.com
http://www.memeorandum.com
http://www.realclearpolitics.com (and their BuzzTracker http://www.foxnews.com/politics/buzztracker/index.html)
http://www.buzztracker.com
http://www.popurls.com
http://www.buzz.yahoo.com

and probably hundreds of others!

Polymeme.com goes live!

editor — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 05:35:47 -0400

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.

A team of Polymeme editors then publishes snippets of the most interesting of these articles, along with links to ALL other blogs that are talking about them. The Polymeme editors also try to illustrate the most interesting entries with Creative Commons-licensed pictures from Flickr.

Please don't also miss our PolyBuzz. PolyBuzz relies on OpenCalais technology from Reuters to automatically tag ALL content produced by blogs in each of our clusters regardless of whether it makes it to Polymeme.com or not. Thus, the tags you see under our Economics section, for example, are generated based on ALL posts written by the economics blogs that we track.

We'd appreciate any feedback about Polymeme and possible future functions that you would like to see in it. Feel free to send me an email or, if you'd prefer to remain anonymous, you can also contact us through this form.

p.s. You'd be surprised to find out that most of the articles that Polymeme actually come from the traditional media. There is no contradiction here; as the Internet makes our public sphere more and more networked, it's only natural that the border between new and traditional media gets very blurry.

this is the first post in our blog

gleb — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 04:47:05 -0400

We are working hard to add things to the site and will post updates here in the blog. You can also subscribe to the blog 's feed here.