Feed Me EThrees

It's E3 season again, and this marks the second year in a row that I haven't attended, after 4 straight years of going.

To celebrate my staying-at-homedness, I rebuilt E3Feed almost from the ground up and relaunched it. It went live today.

For the uninitiated,E3Feed is a kind of automatic newsblog. It automatically pulls newsfeeds from dozens of popular video game news sites and filters out only the E3-related news. This is advantageous, because E3 is one big convoluted clusterflock of news exploding all at once. Hundreds of media outlets from teeny blogs with forged credentials to monolithic conglomerate-owned gaming news media empires are all in one convention center trying to be the first to cover everything.

This makes it difficult for the readers, as they've usually got to constantly be checking a whole bunch of sites for updates, flipping between browser windows and tabs like they're watching the election numbers come in.

E3Feed fixes that by bringing it all together in one place where you can see it, sort it, and search it.

Last year I came up with the idea 3 days before E3 started, and rushed to get it half-working. And half-work it did.

This year I had a bit of a head start. I generally refined things, and made extensive use of the javascript I've learned in the last year (e3feed in '08 was the first time I'd basically ever used javascript extensively, and it was pretty ugly). I added some new features, like pasteable URLs and automatic fetching of story images and videos. Plus it looks a lot better, thanks to John.

The only problem with a site like this is that the most natural place to publicize it is at gaming sites, but none of them want to link to it because it's effectively driving their traffic away from them and to the competition. Fortunately, I found salvation in Wil Wheaton, who was kind enough to mention it on Twitter to his 600,000 subscribers, who all flooded to the site at once and practically melted my server.

So it seems to be flourishing on Twitter, the literal vox populi, rather than on gaming sites... who I shouldn't be so quick to disparage, as they're providing me all the content for E3Feed for e3free.