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We’re working to make What’s up in Ruby a valuable source for the Ruby community. Today we’ve added to that resource by adding a feedback form, an RSS feed of the conversation items, and a widget that you can embed on your site or blog and let everyone know about the latest conversations in the Ruby world. We are also continuing to improve our filtering and add enhanced support for phrases. Results are getting better.

One bit of feedback we got was on the search function. Currently, the search operates on our database of conversation items. If you search for a conversation item that we don’t have the site gracefully handles it but does not return any results. As we continue to improve our phrase support and parse greater number of blog posts (and more) so to will the search improve.

How often is the site updated? Great question. While you can always see the last time we did our update on the site, we update the site every 4 hours, starting at 10 AM, and then updating again at 2 PM, 6 PM, and so on.

Next up is allowing you all to provide suggestions of blogs we should add to our pull, along with showing you what we already pull from.

As always we are interested in your feedback. Please let us know what you think and how we can improve the site and make it a great resource for you.

After the initial launch of What’s up in Ruby, people were confused about what we were trying to accomplish. They saw the site as another search engine specific to the Ruby space.

That was my fault.

The confusion was understandable. The design of the site emphasized search, and the initial post I did was off track. We got to work right away on these issues and today are launching a major update to What’s up in Ruby.

The goals of What’s up in Ruby, and the series of niche sites we are launching, are:

• Provide insight into the latest conversations going on within a context (topic)
• Take our visitors to where those conversations are taking place
• Allow our visitors to search for other conversation topics of interest to them, returning results that are only relevant to the context (i.e. not searching the entire Internet)

The updates we have done over the past week accomplish those goals. What we did was:

• Update the design to emphasize the conversation items
• Make the site perform a search when you click on a conversation item
• Return results ordered by the number of times the conversation item is used
• Add pagination to the results page to make browsing easier
• Run our feed pull every four hours so you have the freshest conversation
• All the code, all of it, is 100% Ruby and Ruby on Rails goodness

With this Beta 2 release we continue to choose all of the RSS feeds we pull. With 1.0 we will be asking for your suggestions of feeds that are relevant to the context. The more feeds we get the better the site becomes at informing of you what people are talking about.

Thank you all for your initial feedback on the site. Keep it coming!

You’ve given us feedback and we have listened.

My goal with whatsupinruby.com (and the other what’s up sites we will be releasing) is to get rid of my RSS reader. To do this, I need the site to do two things:

• Tell me what people are talking about in a given context
• Take me to those conversations so I can learn more

Whatsupinruby.com does the first, but frankly falls down in the second. The issue is our approach. Rather than our results being a list of the latest posts on the topic (in this case Ruby and associated technologies) it spiders all things Ruby and returns Google-like results based on links, keyword frequency, etc. While that is what we built and what I originally asked for, that is not what I want. What I want is a list of sites that are talking about the conversation item I am interested in (i.e. ruby, rails, memcache, etc.).

Another point of confusion (again caused by me) is the search box and its prominence on the site. The real reason for the site isn’t search (which you can use Google for) but rather to be kept up to date on the latest conversation. The prominence of the search box takes away from that in a big way. We are changing that.

We are currently updating the site as follows:

• Updating the site design to give prominence to the conversation items rather than the search box
• When you click on a conversation item it will auto-search rather than putting the search term in the search box
• Results returned by a search will be a list of the latest blog posts that are discussing that item
• Even more to come in 1.0

What do you all think? Will that make what we are doing more or less relevant to you all? Will the updates we are putting in place help people to understand our goal? We’d love and welcome all of your feedback.

Our goal is to put out the improved whatsupinruby.com by early next week.

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.