Random Thoughts on Strymr and Content Discovery

I jump from blog to blog. There is so much good content out there, people doing great things — travelling, biking, climbing, backpacking. I want to find it all, but it’s currently actually difficult. Sure, there is my facebook and google feeds pulling in content, but most of it’s junk and litters my brainspace. Meanwhile, there is really good content that I, and others never see.

I created Strymr a while ago, which was an rss reader, but I stopped allowing others to create accounts since there are other services out there and it takes quite a bit of processing power. I transitioned it to a curated list of websites that constantly gathers posts based on topic (as well as pulling in video from vimeo and images from flickr), but it still requires me to find good websites to add.

I think an interesting concept for a website would be to enter a url, and it grabs all of the posts from that website, as well as the most recent posts from all of the websites that the selected website links to. It could even search all of the websites linked from the linked websites. It wouldn’t really be too different than what I have on Strymr currently though, other than it would perhaps do the work of finding more interesting content. Unfortunately it would require tons of processing power, since it would have to crawl the selected site, and all the sites it links to on demand. But I could set this up for myself, as a way of building a map of content. Enter a url and add it to one of my topic categories, let it process on it for a while, digging up new related sites. Add those sites to the list of websites to search.

I’m usually interested in the photography presented on websites I follow too. It could get into some sticky copyright stuff, but It would be extra cool to pull extract all of the photos from all articles posted on a given day (Strymr currently compiles all posts on topic, and by the day), and show all of that too, somewhere on the page. Click on a photo (and rate photos!) and be taken to that post.

I think It would be super interesting if all of this was built out into a visual spider web of relationships and new content. It may not make it any easier to digest though, but it would be interesting to explore. It probably wouldn’t be the default view for Strymr (I would love to have some time to still develop a better magazine style view), but I could see myself spending lazy Sunday mornings navigating through the web of content, finding new things.