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I follow close to 300 RSS feeds. I do this to follow conversations and trends across a variety of topics including web development, business, marketing, parallel computing, and much more. The problem with this is information overload. I can clear my RSS reader at midnight and by morning have more than 1000 new items. Within a few hours I can quickly lose track of what’s going on. If I miss a few days, there is no going back.

Another reason for this amount of reading is to have a jumping off point for a search. I “listen” in on what’s being discussed and as topics bubble up to the top, I use that to perform more research via search engine. If I know nothing about the subject past what people write, I usually start off using industry buzzwords. Most of what I get back is noise; it isn’t relevant. I love the fact that everyone and their mother is now a content producer writing on every subject known to man, but by doing so the level of noise has greatly increased. My search and the results I get back lacks context.

Today’s search engines index the entire web. When I go to a search engine and type in a keyword I get billions of results. Results are ordered based on how many people are linking to those sources, the quality of those incoming links, and much more. Smaller niche sites with lower traffic get buried. That’s a problem. It is those niche sites that to me have more value than some of the larger sites that may have an article or two on a popular subject.

Another issue I find is a lack of context in trend information. I type in “Ruby” and “Java” and half the results are about the tsunamis and Java the place, not Java the programming language. When I try to apply context I get errors. But even beyond that, I don’t want to simply know what people are searching for since many don’t know what to search for in the first place. I want to see the trends in conversations within a given topic, or context.

What I wanted was a site that tells me what is going on within a given context, and then allows me to search within relevant sources for that context. Rather than reading hundreds of RSS feeds and performing the filtering and analysis myself, I want the site to tell me what is going on, and allow me to dig deeper. I then want to see the trends in conversations within that context. For me, it’s all about knowing what’s going on, searching within relevant sources, and seeing emerging trends, all within a context.

To that end, Atlantic Dominion Solutions is happy to announce that starting today, we are launching a series of niche search sites that do just that, starting with http://www.whatsupinruby.com. When you go to the site, you will see the top 30 conversation items that are bubbling to the top of the conversation. Click on the link and search within sites that are relevant to that topic. You can type in anything you want, but we give you a jumping off point based on the latest conversations.

With this beta release, we tell our engines what feeds to follow and what sites to spider. With the 1.0 release, you will be able to tell us what feeds we should add, what sites we should spider, and see more than the top 30 conversation items. The more you provide, the better it gets.

As online conversations grow we need a way to filter the noise, get to the heart of a subject, and find out what is really going on. We need to identify emerging trends and measure them over time. This new way of searching starts today. Checkout http://www.whatsupinruby.com. It’s just the beginning.