The Datamining blog recently talked about the times when bloggers don’t blog or when experts in an area avoid talking on something they would normally talk about. This left me wondering what kind ot trend analyzer could be built into feeds and IM applications etc to let you know when people you read a lot have stopped blogging. A kind of last activity notice that you have on Bebo and other sites. For example Tom Raftery has been very quiet on his blog but his Twitter account has shown activity. With it we know he met with the IDA and impressed them with the datacentre build. Sometimes his Flickr feed shows what he is up to as well.
Wouldn’t it be nice as well as to receive notices when friends go online, to get them from your IM and your bloglines aggregator if there hasn’t been any activity in a while? Maybe it’s a bit too stalkery or needy for some people but it would probably be a nice plugin for some kind of contact manager. It might also be handy for watching the blogs of people making a product and if they go all silent then maybe a big launch is on the way or an acquisition? Handy to monitor the competition too.
Yes, almost like the inverse of… cue buzzword du jour… Attention. Or lack of Attention. Or Attention to offline stuff.
One of the first little mashups I did with twitter was a timeline of Irish tweets (while that was still manageable) and it was fascinating, to me at least, to see how much activity was registered by the nighthawks in the group.
Jaiku provides some of this functionality now. So does a well-oiled cross-media aggregator. The aggie used by Zenark can tell you every time a minister burps by radio citation, local press mention, broadsheet inch or blog link.
yes – the perfect stalker toolkit…
Damien,
your semi-regular references to stalking and stalker tools should probably have me worried!!!
Still, you are absolutely correct – and another thing such a tool should aggregate are where people are leaving comments!
cocomment allows people track their own comments, though I installed it and then forgot about it.