I got email from Rich Skrenta asking me to take a look at Topix and maybe write a word or two about it. I have immense, huge respect for Rich, since he was the main man in cooking up Dmoz, and it had the potential to turn the Web inside out before AOL bought and pissed in it (Disclosure: I got fired as a dmoz editor for attitude problems). He’s a member of the small Tribe Who Make Things Happen. As for Topix... I dunno. I’m pretty sure it’s worth the time it would take you to follow that link and look at it. It’s got a local-news feature that might be great only it doesn’t work for anywhere unAmerican which I am, so I dialed up my favorite place in the US, namely Portland OR (the best bookstore in the world and many microbrews, what’s not to like?) and that seemed pretty neat. As for the top page, it looked like a newspaper, a good newspaper, in fact a better newspaper than the local offering for most people living outside a huge metropolis. Topix hasn’t yet earned a spot in my visit-every-day list, which is pretty damn short since RSS came along... Rich tells me there’s a feed for every category, too. Hey, Skrenta himself has a blog, and it looks good. Subscribed. He’s the only other person I’ve seen so far that’s noticed the insanely-expensive Google snippet service and drawn the right conclusions; been meaning to blog about that but now I don’t need to. Skrenta he da man. Topix? Have your own look.
