The last couple days I’ve been working on tracking conversations around Remote Control (R/C) planes, cars, and helicopters. You can follow my progress at www.thredr.com/rc.
Creating a useful list of interesting R/C content has been a bit of a challenge. Why? The big issue is that sites don’t link very much. Further, several of them appear to be more silos than open platforms. This isn’t right or wrong, it’s just the way they are. Like in other verticals, I’ve noticed that many of the sites on the same topic often coalesce around one pattern. In some verticals, linking is common (such as in the Tablet PC space). Others don’t. Some push out full posts/content. Some don’t. Some are blog oriented. Some are forum oriented.
In the case of the R/C field, there are a couple key forums, several of which require registration. And others sites lack RSS feeds or blogs. They just manually enter “posts” into HTML pages.
The challenge then is to automatically mine the interesting material from all this varied content.
So far, thredr is following about 30 feeds and a couple forums. The most active content and therefore interesting content is coming from RCGroups and DIYDrones.
I hope I can add in some of the helicopter and other sites without too much trouble, but I’m not sure how this is going to all work out. Ultimately, a site that has a conversation lister should help draw traffic, but I can see where they are reluctant to open up their content because they are concerned that people will simply republish it as their own–on spam sites and the like.
I’ll see how far I can take this. It means I may have to do some alternative things to get around these legacy posting models. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it’ll encourage me to step back and try to create some unique tracking formats–some of which are going to be quite exciting. At least for me. 🙂