For more than two years, we've been talking about services that could democratically tabulate the most popular shared items on the Web, using Google Reader link blogs (like mine) as their data set. In early 2008, there was a practical explosion of such services, started by Feedheads, and rapidly followed on by ReadBurner, RSSMeme, Shared Reader and others. And while it's the earliest of days for a new service called InFeeds, developers continue to see this as a project worth tackling.


The service started gobbling up popular shared item blogs this morning (as you can see on Twitter), bills itself as a "shared items feed aggregator" and asks, "what's interesting in your feeds?"

Like the aforementioned competitors, InFeeds looks like it is going to show you items that have received the most shares from registered link blogs, sorting by 2 or more shares and 5 or more shares, for example.

If you look at its spartan "Upcoming" page, you can see that individual shared items are displayed with the original headline and author, who shared the item, and a number of tags, such as "Facebook", "iPhone" or "Google".


One Item I Shared Via InFeeds, Displaying Tags
With RSSmeme founder Ben Golub working at FriendFeed, and the ReadBurner site currently being down for repairs, there could be an opportunity for somebody like InFeeds to sneak in and be interesting. So while I may advise the ReadBurner team, I think it makes sense to hop over to InFeeds and provide your Google Reader shared links URL to give this developer a little push.

You can submit your URL here: http://infeeds.com/

As I stopped providing monthly updates early last year into traffic activities and other statistics on the blog, I have not been paying as much close attention to achieving what some would call milestones. But on Saturday, with the blog post Good People, Bad Companies: The Intersection of Skill and Luck, I hit the mark of 2,000 posts on louisgray.com, since early 2006, covering a period of 3 1/3 years, essentially. Since then, we've posted 8 more times (including this one), so I am a tad tardy in marking the achievement.

Back when I did watch these things more closely, on October 11, 2007, I marked hitting the 1,000 post number, and at the time highlighted what were then my top ten things I blogged about, including: 1) Apple, iPod and iTunes, 2) Blogs, Links and RSS, 3) Google, 4) TiVo and TV, 5) The Oakland A's, 6) The Cal Bears, 7) The Sacramento Kings, 8) Nintendo Wii and Games, 9) Statistics and 10) Technology Innovators and Startups.

Amazing to think of how much things have changed (in my opinion) in just 18 months, over which I, with the help of some strong guest authors, knocked out the next 1,000 posts.

Of the 10 blogging topics I noted back in October 2007, I would say that Apple, Blogs and RSS, Google, and Technology Innovators and Startups are still core focuses, with early startups rising incredibly. But I don't talk as much about Apple and TiVo as I once did, I reduced statistics discussion, and practically eliminated sports altogether.

Now, and you tell me if I'm wrong, I believe I blog about: 1) New Web Services and Startups, 2) Social Media Tools, including Twitter and FriendFeed, 3) Blogs and RSS, 4) Online Best Practices, 5) Google and Search Competitors, 6) Apple and iTunes, 7) Business and Finance, 8) IPhone Apps and Games, 9) Information Discovery and Overload, and 10) Personal Updates.

I wish there were an easy way to point out what were posts 50, 100, 250 and 500, but for now, it's always good enough just to point out post #1 from January 9th, 2006: Macworld Expo Eve 2006. If only I knew then what was to be a little hobby would turn out to be an obsession.

TweetMeme, the aggregator of popular microupdates that have been sent around the Twitterverse, launched a major update today, adding the ability to search more than 15 million links, including not just the tweets themselves, but also the text from the Web pages, blog posts, videos and images, delivered in real time. The new search capabilities greatly enhance the index, which tracks "the hottest stories on Twitter", and goes head to head with today's announcements from OneRiot, and planned updates from Twitter itself, due soon.

You can find the new TweetMeme search engine here: http://search.tweetmeme.com/


Searching TweetMeme for Popular Facebook Tweets

Updating the Same Search for "Best Match"
The search engine indexes new stories as they are found in Twitter, and offers a great deal of filtering and customization. You can sort results by "Best Match", "Age" and "Retweet Count", showing the most popular forwarded tweets. Meanwhile, the results display categories for each update, and you can even filter by the media type, including news, images or videos.


You Can Filter Results In a Number of Ways on TweetMeme
Like any good search engine for monitoring the new world of real-time updates, TweetMeme even lets you sign up to get search results by RSS.


Searching TweetMeme for louisgray.com Shows Most Popular Posts on Twitter
For site owners, like me, the ability to search TweetMeme for your own name or domain name, and sort results by category or popularity in retweets is a great improvement, letting you determine what stories were deemed most popular on Twitter, and you can dive down to see who is getting to the data first and has the most influence, or ability to get their updates redistributed through their network.

TweetMeme is a product built by the team behind fav.or.it, headed by Nick Halstead. You can, of course, also follow TweetMeme on Twitter.

Think you are getting crushed by Information Overload? Two weeks ago, I had the opportunity to present at the Inbound Marketing Summit, talking about how to find signal in the noise. Video is below.


Found courtesy of Justin Levy:
There Is No Information Overload - Louis Gray - Inbound Marketing Summit

Also, get the presentation from SlideShare:
There Is No Information Overload