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.

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.