About story clustering, popularity, and personalization
The Library Clips blog has two very interesting posts about clustering, popularity and personalization. The first post explains how “clustered stories” help bloggers:
“Just say you have 1000 unread items in your RSS Reader, you boil a cup of chai and get into rss zen mode.
You come across a really cool story you want to blog about, but before you publish a post you want to see who else may have posted on this same story, so you cruise around your RSS Reader clicking on your favourite feeds to see if they have also reported on the story.”
Indeed, clustering stories, which basically means grouping related articles and blog posts, can be useful for both the power users/bloggers, because it helps them stay updated with the latest blogosphere buzz, and the persons who just want the essential stories, and need to skip the details. Of course, clustering is powerful if it is combined with a mechanism for detecting and eliminating duplicates: articles which are just identical copies of the same story. MyFeedz manages to do both things, by detecting which stories link or refer to other stories, and which are simply copies of others, and then presenting this information in an organized way for the readers.
In the second post, we find out the advantages of having a personalization engine (that learns from each user’s reading habits - just as myFeedz does).
“What I’m saying here is that I still want clustered items, but I want stories ranked according to me, not just how popular everyone thinks they are. In fact, I want both, show me two streams:
Stream 1 - stories ranked based on my attention
Stream 2 - stories ranked by blogosphere popularity”
Of course, it often helps to see what is also popular for the community. MyFeedz offers the best of both worlds: top articles for your profile and top articles from the community of users.
February 17th, 2007 at 4:48 am
For the past 4 years, I’ve had to do all this manually. When Tailrank started doing what they do, I figured that was as good as it would get. However, I would rather my interests grow from what I read, rather than what others link to. In fact, I had a slightly-less ambitious project that required people to enter their feeds just in this manner to do the same thing.
I really hope that I don’t get the problem with Tailrank, in that it constantly feeds me the most popular stories of the day, but the ones I have absolutely no interest in.
February 20th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Hello,
I see your point. The real issue here is striking a balance between what the community finds interesting and what you find interesting. Or, better yet, offering the best of both worlds. And I think this is what myFeedz is trying to achieve, to some extent.
All the best,
Marius