Monday, July 05, 2004

Blogory RSS feeds

Findory Blogory just launched a new and unusual feature: personalized, aggregated, and adaptive RSS feeds.

The RSS feed is personalized, so every reader gets a unique feed with articles that match his or her interests. The feed aggregates weblog articles from thousands of other weblogs, combining all the weblogs into one RSS stream and helping readers find and discover new articles and new weblogs. And Blogory's feed is adaptive, learning your interests as you read articles from the feed and changing the RSS feed to more closely match your interests.

To my knowledge, this is the first personalized, adaptive RSS feed. There's nothing else like it out there.

Many people might want to add it to their weblog reader as an easy way to read weblogs. For people who are overwhelmed with tens or hundreds of RSS feeds listed in their reader, Blogory might be a way of cutting through the glut, helping them find what they need each day without having to search manually through a long list of feeds. For others, Blogory may be a way of discovering interesting new weblogs.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Isn't AmphetaRate similar? though probably less slick.

My NewsRanker aggregator is a little different. Instead of giving you more news, it helps you deal with the news you have by personally prioritizing it.

Greg Linden said...

AmphetaRate is interesting. It is a personalized RSS feed. Good catch. From the concepts page on AmphetaRate's site, it appears that the algorithm is a combination of traditional collaborative filtering and a Bayesian content filter. Unfortunately, both of these algorithms suffer from long training times, something that is discussed as an issue on AmphetaRate's concept page. It appears that the usage of AmphetaRate is low -- I just started using it myself -- but I'd also suspect that scalability and quality would be issues. Nevertheless, AmphetaRate is an interesting and unusual example of a personalized RSS feed. Thanks for pointing it out.

NewsRanker appears to be a client-side application. Details of the underlying algorithm are unavailable and I didn't want to bother installing it, but it does appear to be some kind of personalized news service. The key question is how well it works, something I wasn't able to determine. From what I could tell, NewsRanker does not offer personalized RSS feeds.

Greg Linden said...
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Greg Linden said...

After using AmphetaRate a bit, I've noticed some problems. The lack of immediate feedback on the rating makes for a poor user experience. With Findory's RSS feeds for Findory News and Findory Blogory, the site updates immediately when I read an article through the RSS feed. With AmphetaRate, I have to wait for the next refresh of the RSS feed.

The quality of the personalization also seems relatively weak. While Findory's sites personalize fairly well after reading just a few articles, AmphetaRate is still giving very poor choices to me after rating 10+ items.

Nevertheless, it is interesting to see another attempt at personalized RSS feeds. AmphetaRate definitely does have unique feeds for each reader and does change the feed based on how a reader uses the feed. That is interesting.