twopointouch

I’ve been tagged twice for this so here goes. I have also cheated and extended this out to two weeks…

Telly: watched Extras and Dr Who over Christmas. Neither of them were as good as I’d hoped. Otherwise, I watched The Most Annoying People of the Year on BBC 3 through iPlayer, which was quite possibly the bitchiest thing I’ve ever seen, in a good way. In other people’s houses I was subjected to seemingly dozens of TV talent shows and shouty soaps.

Books: Ludmila’s Broken English by DBC Pierre is an excellent read, though not quite up to the standard of Vernon God Little, IMHO. The book has two separate threads which are well-created but then brought together rather clumsily in the finale. Imperium - Robert Harris - his worst book to date, sadly, though still a good read for a train journey. For self-improvement, I managed to get through a few more chapters of Ackroyd’s London: The Biography, too. I’ve got his book about the Thames lined up once that’s finished, some time in 2009.

Papers: My normal diet is freesheets - the Metro and the London Shite. Staying at relatives’ houses meant a shock switch to The Torygraph and the Daily Mail. How do people find the time? And why do they bother? Also enjoyed my regular doses of Uncut, Private Eye and the Economist.

Online: I’ve been offline for most of the time over the last two weeks, which was a very good idea and means I’m keen to get stuck into those 300 unread feeds.

Games: do these count? Anyway, much of my break was spent with The Witcher, which I can thoroughly recommend to old-school CRPG fans. Also developed a crippling addiction to fab puzzler The Lost Treasures of Montezuma.

I have a bit of a love/hate relationship with Techmeme. It’s very useful for days when you haven’t got time to read through your RSS subscriptions (viz. most days) and just want a snapshot of what the techies in the blogosphere are talking about.

On the other hand, it tends to focus very heavily on the supposed A-listers and Silicon Valley gossip. Forgive me, but I am not too interested in what Jason Calacanis said about Nick Denton’s shoes at Michael Arrington’s barbecue. What they ought to do, I reckon, is throw out their existing reading list and use mine instead.

That idea might not fly in some circles. So that’s why I am very interested in Megite. The opening page looks much the same as Techmeme or Tailrank. But they seem to have a wider spread of sites monitored and there are a large number of subsections that allow you to focus in on topics from food to finance. The fun bit is ‘My Megite’. Basically, you email the guy - Matthew Chen - your OPML file and he’ll create a personalised page for you. [Not-so-techies: your OPML file is a list of all the feeds you subscribe to. You can export it from your news reader site or program.] Here’s the personalised page for the Search Engine Watch blog. I’ll post mine when I hear back from Matthew. (see below)

There’s not too much more information available, but it appears that the business model of the site is to license their engine to organisations. This sounds like a great idea: staying on top of the news in some industries must be a nightmare with dozens of sites and blogs to visit. Sphere, Icerocket and Technorati searches are OK, but don’t do a great job of organising the information that emerges. Good luck to them, I say, though they may need to find a slightly more elegant way of uploading OPMLs if the service takes off.

Update: Matthew is clearly working very hard. He came back to me with a link to my personal megite within two hours of this post. He also explains that there will be an online form for processing OPML files when they have secured enough resources to ensure that the server doesn’t fall over when lots of processes are submitted at the same time. Matthew points out that a link to an online OPML is better for these personalised pages because then they can keep it live when your subscriptions change. Oh, and they have a blog.