Library clips

RSS reader overload is starting to take its toll as it is now way too easy to subscribe to lots of stuff, and with the explosion of blogs and RSS search feeds there is so much good stuff out there…so I’m always interested in new ways to read content.

Previously I mentioned the Personal Bee RSS reader - in addition to traditional feed reading it can also “bubble” up tag clouds (auto-tagged hot keywords) to read the latest items…so instead of slogging through your river of news or reading feed by feed, you can just choose to read by auto-tagged items (keyphrases) and leave the rest out of which you have no interest, similar to TagCloud.

This certainly helps with information overload as you don’t have to read every item in every feed that you subscribe to, and at the same time you don’t have to get rid of any feeds to reduce the overload…you are keeping all your feeds but just choosing to read specific items via automated key tags (key phrases).

This sounds great, you don’t have to throw out any feeds (phew!!), and you don’t have to slog through everything, as there is the option to only view stuff you are interested in within your collection of feeds, just choose the tag from the cloud…this sounds like a dream

…only thing is that you have to trust the Personal Bee parser in extracting and ranking the keyphrases (it’s worth a shot).

So how is it different to TagCloud, well for starters it is an RSS reader, but how is the keyword extraction different…here is the unique method according to the new instruction, HOW-TO Be a Beekeeper:

“Each Bee edition ranks topics (i.e. keyphrases) proportional to their popularity within the interest window and inversely proportionally to their historical popularity. It’s a simple concept, yet it works well. Consider for instance the topic “Google.” Without an established historical baseline, the topic “Google” would constantly rank high on the topic list, thus pushing down other potentially new and interesting topics. In a Bee edition, “Google” would rarely make the topic list because of its high historical popularity. Instead, the day Google announced “Google Talk,” that topic immediately reached the top of the ranked topic list because the phrase “Google Talk” was mentioned 100’s of times and had no history in the edition.”

…The Personal Bee tracks multi-word keyphrases rather than single keywords. Single keywords are simply too general and/or ambiguous

So the difference is that it seems to be effective in teasing out keyphrases for new unique terms, which is great for current awareness.

The idea of Personal Bee is to house folders of topical content, and invite others to see…these folders are called Editions (just like a Bloglines folder)…so you could call a folder/edition, “Folksonomy”, and include blogs that specialise in folksonomies, or even include category feeds from blogs that have categories such as tags, folksonomy, social bookmarks, etc…, then also include a few RSS search feeds, or even del.icio.us, Furl, or Technorati Tag feeds…whatever you like, Google News, etc…

Then give it a month or two to do its work, and it will generate keyphrases in order to browse/view your edition - instead of flicking through every page of the newspaper, so to speak, stories are grouped into topic tags, and the unique tags to your edition are ranked highly as they are considered important or pressing topic news.

There are intentions to augument this process with human based rating and tagging…look forward to see how it pans out.