As I explained it to one audience yesterday, I consider services like PubSub and Technorati’s Watchlists to be the rough blogging equivalent of Google’s News Alerts. One scans blogs, the other news, but same principle. They watch a channel for mentions of a keyword or link.
In concept, it’s a terrific idea. In execution, it’s mostly still a terrific idea. But lately, it’s less terrific. Much less.
PubSub, of the available services, has been for me the least prone to duplicate mentions – i.e. false-positive returns that come back again and again. But since the Adobe/Macromedia news, PubSub has taken to showing me the pictured Industry Standard story featuring a quote from my esteemed colleague several times per day, often with multiple mentions in the same return. Each and every day, I’m treated to that same article somewhere between 5 and 10 times. It’s driving me crazy, to the point that I’m considering dropping that particular watchlist.
So while I don’t know if Tim is right, and Atom’s the answer to this particular problem, I do know that it’s a problem that needs to be solved. Because I’m certainly not the only one with such a problem. Please guys, kill the dupes.
