Library clips

If you have Rojo set on manually marking a feed as read….then you read a feed and decide you haven’t got time to read it all, just close down Rojo, and the feed will still be there as unread.

But what if, when you were reading this feed you collapse/expanded an item, then closed Rojo…well, when you view that feed again all items will still be unread accept the one you have collapse/expand (as this action considers an item as read)…same goes with the items you tagged, flagged, clicked on the title, emailed, or shared.

So to see this item again (the item you collapse/expand), when reading your feed just choose to see read & unread items, and there it will be
…or go to your “Saved” section, and view “Stories I’ve Read”, and here you will see it to.

Stories I’ve Read

This section contains the items (stories) that you have collapse/expand, flagged, tagged, clicked on the title, emailed, and shared…it considers any of these actions as showing interest in the story…so it is basically a folder the automatically populates with items you find interesting.

NOTE: If you click on “Mark as Read” for the whole page you are viewing these stories WILL NOT appear in the “Stories I’ve Read” section…same goes if you collapse/expand all stories.

NOTE: If you want to see every story that has ever been in your account…when you log in the first view is “Recent Stories from all Feeds”, just click on “Show Read & Unread”.

Basically the “Stories I’ve Read” folder contains stories you consider interesting, therefore the system can use this information to rank new unread stories. Besides viewing stories by latest date, Rojo offers to view stories by “Relevancy”…this relevancy view must be based on the content in the “Stories I’ve Read” folder.

Issues

If you flag or tag a story there is a good chance you find it relevant…but if you collapse/expand a story I don’t think this action neccessarily means you find the story interesting, I think it just means the title may have interested you so you expanded it, maybe to find out you don’t like what you see, or you collapsed it to get it out the way.

Same goes with clicking on the title of a story, you may do this to read the native website as the feed in Rojo only had excerpts, so naturally you launch to the native site…only to find out you may not be interested in the story after all.

And, you may email or share a story, as it may interest others, but may not have any interest to you.

I think there is some semantics in the term “interest”, as you may show interest to see more, but find out your investigative interest led you to nothing interesting at all.

In summary, I don’t think collapse/expand, clicking on the title, emailing, or sharing a story are specific enough actions to define your interests…flagging, and tagging I consider more of an appropriate measure of interest or attention.

The unfortunate thing is that you can’t clean up your “Storeies I’ve Read” section so it just contains the attention data that you know is relevant…it would be good if you could do this from time to time, refreshing your attention data, in order for your Relavancy view to be updated to your pruned and current attention stream.

So if you email, share, or click on the title of a story you have no way to stop this appearing in the “Stories I’ve Read” folder…this means you can’t avoid the noise that your relevancy will be based on, so this relevancy in turn won’t be personally accurate.

The only thing you can avoid is collapse/expanding stories, by always having expand on, in this case you will not need to manipulate an item, preventing unfortunate items to appear in your “Stories I’ve Read” folder.

Voting Hack

What you can do is always have stories expanded, when ever you see a story you really like but you are not sharing, emailing, clicking the title, flagging, or tagging it, make sure you collapse it so it records in your attention stream, ie. the “Stories I’ve Read” folder.

Better still RSS Readers could just add a voting button, as this will explicitly say, “I like this item, please record it in my attention stream”…whether you perform any of the actions above (flag, tag, share, etc…), you have to vote for the item for it to go in your attention stream folder.

At the moment your attention stream is not explicit (it is recorded in the background), this is great as the user doesn’t have to do anything…on the other hand, voting is explicit and therefore accurate…it will make the relevancy more worth while.

Otherwise the only way around this, as mentioned before, is to be able to prune your attention folder, ie. the “Stories I’ve Read” folder.

…see an earlier post on Rojo.