Announcing: The new Particls Sidebar

Announcing the all new Particls Sidebar.



The new Particls Sidebar is your personalized, streaming view of everything that matters to you online.

It's real-time. It's animated. It's social. It's always there, keeping you informed.

It can also be set to "Auto-hide" so that it takes up less space while keeping users informed.

It is now the default output adapter for Particls. It joins the Ticker (now disabled by default) and Popup Alerts as part of the bundled set of adapters.

Nick Hodge, a Professional Geek at Microsoft says "I think Particls just changed my life. I've replaced my Microsoft Windows Vista Sidebar with this new version of Particls. Having Particls watch the web for me keeps me on-the-ball, more than caffeine. Well, almost."

Experience your news, alerts and updates like never before. Subscribe to your feeds, type in your interests and watch them stream in like a slick river of news.

Got a better idea? Write your own output adapter. Particls is the best Alerts and Attention Management Platform around.

Coverage

Coverage has already started...

• Mashable
• Techcrunch
• Nick Hodge

Added to the Megite Index

Over the last few days some new stuff has happened in relation to this blog.

First, we seem to keep appearing on the TechMeme related discussion section whenever I post about a topic that happens to be covered there. Second, someone from Megite (or an automated bot) has commented on a post and declared that we should be congratulated because we are now part of the Megite index.

Does Megite work the same way that TechMeme works?

This is how I understand it:

1. They crawl a subset of blogs (the 'A-List') and then algorithmically determine and cluster the topics they're talking about at any given time.
   
2. They look for outgoing or incoming links from those blogs to find additional discussions to link to/cluster.
   
3. They look for patterns in outgoing links (from their index of blogs 'A-list blogs') to determine which blogs are worthy enough to be added to the index.

If this is the case, does this mean we have somehow been automatically determined as a Quality/A-list Blog by the Megite engine? Should we expect to be profiled on their home page more often now?

At the risk of angering the Megite gods, who's to say that this is a worthy blog? What is the definition. Is it based on how many A-listers link to us? How many comments we get? How often we post about similar topics to A-listers? How many links we get from A-listers?

And who's to say what the A-list finds interesting is relevant to everyone - or to me.

These questions are actually more relevant for Techmeme because Megite at least has a nifty feature whereby you can upload your OPML and it starts to build a personal homepage just for you. That's a great feature.

I have also met Gabe from Techmeme and he's a great guy. He tells me he is cooking up lots of new features so I am sure it's all in the pipeline.

But I am still interested in what constitutes a worthy blog for the public 'front page'.

As for Tailrank I'm not sure if it works the same way either. Kevin has not taken the time to explain it to me. I wonder if we are in their index yet? What's the go with that Kevin!

In any case - if we are now part of a few blogs that are considered Megite worthy - thanks. If this is a normal occurrence and nothing special (maybe even some comment spam) then... I am less grateful hah.

Update: Kevin posts about the Megite comment spam issue as well. He seems to agree this might be attention getting behavior that is a little over the mark as well. I think that if it was a personal message with a personal name or even a private note via email (our contact details are not hidden) it might be a better approach.