Daypop returns

Daypop Top 40 Links

Daypop is back. They're a perfect example of what I think of as a key principle of innovation: think about what happens when you abstract things by one more layer.

Instead of just aggregating links to stories, Daypop tracks the relative popularity over time, reminding us that sometimes it's the data about the data that's really interesting.

TV Guide and Google both exemplify the same thing: Google changed the world by going beyond a simple index of pages, adding the dimension of "who else finds this interesting?" TV Guide has proven the value of metadata by in some years being more profitable than the three networks combined.

And, of course, that's how we got calculus.