I’ve had a few people email me with questions about the new PokerFilter blog I set up last week. First, let me do a little better job at explaining what it is.

PokerFilter is an open blog. Anybody can post to it. It’s not designed for people to post three page blog posts about how poker imitates life but for people to create a PokerFilter post that links back to their three page blog post about how poker imitates life. You can also use it to post links to other blog posts you might have run across that you thought were interesting. And you can also use to it just post links to poker related news.

The idea is intended to emulate a popular blog called MetaFilter. MetaFilter describes itself as:

Metafilter is a weblog that anyone can contribute a link or a comment to. A typical weblog is one person posting their thoughts on the unique things they find on the web. This website exists to break down the barriers between people, to extend a weblog beyond just one person, and to foster discussion among its members.

I was thinking of a similar idea here. I even stuck with the hideous design so as to help bridge the conceptual gap for those who might already be familiar with MetaFilter (the design may change in the future).

I was also thinking about the RSS Aggregator post I did some months back. After having worked on the designs for several weeks I noticed some potential pitfalls. For instance, because the entire utility of the program centered on collaborative filtering, it needed a large user base for it to be effective. I wasn’t confident enough that we could establish a significantly large enough user base to produce high quality so that was one of the things that kept me from actually moving forward on that idea. I’m hoping that with PokerFilter we can bridge that gap. It’s not a perfect answer but it’s one that achieves many of the original goals of the RSS Aggregator without an enormous about of work.

I used some open source software called Metaphilter to create this and it seems the original authors may not be updating it any longer. It’s PHP based so I’ve been poking around and starting to compile a list of potential improvements that I’ll initiate if the PokerFilter idea seems to take off and warrant additional time and effort.

For those of you who haven’t checked it out yet, please do. If you’re unsure about posting or don’t yet have anything interesting to post, subscribe to the RSS feed so you can get some idea of what kinds of things people are posting and . . . because it should be pretty interesting.

I’m not sure if the idea will catch on or not but it’s something different and I thought it would at least be interesting to see what happens.