JavaOne is set to kick off tomorrow morning (May 6-9th), and there will be no shortage of coverage, but how do you track the best conversations for this giant conference? To address this problem, Marshall Kirpatrick and Sun Microsystems have put together an RSS-based microsite (BlogCentral 2008 @ www.sun.com/blogcentral) for tracking the best content for all of their products:

JavaOne is a huge conference where scores of attendees will be blogging about a wide variety of Sun products and announcements. I worked with Sun to create a page called BlogCentral (hopefully to be moved to sun.com/blogcentral by conference time!) that aggregates all the latest and the most popular blog posts about the conference and 15 particular Sun projects and products. It’s like a news dashboard for anyone interested in seeing what’s being written about at JavaOne.

Given the amount of coverage, Sun asked Marshall to help them identify the most popular content for each of their products - a perfect application for PostRank. After assembling and reformatting each RSS feed, Marshall ran them through AideRSS to extract the most popular stories:

From Dapper I also took the blogsearch feed URL over to AideRSS, where we got a new feed of just the 20% most commented on, linked-to and bookmarked blog posts in each search feed. That made up the Popular feed that you’ll see around the JavaOne Blogcentral page.

Interested in the buzz around JavaOne? Head to JavaOne BlogCentral 2008!