Spotback : attention news
Just got the word from TechCrunch about Spotback, the news personalised news service similar to Findory.
It will work without an account, but if you create an account (takes 2 seconds, you can use the community features).
Basically what it does is offer new stories according to your reading behaviour…it’s awesome to see it work , just rate a story you like higher than 2.5 and similar story will slide in.
Story
Each story belongs in a topic, which is organised in a category
- each story has an excerpt, clicking the title launches to the native site, clicking on more will show you the full story via an ajax window (or pop-up window, not sure what those windows are called).
- each story links to the source home page as well
- comment, save , email a story, and rate the story on the slider
- you can also block a source, or block a topic, or see more…
For each story you can see “people who liked this story also liked”…this takes you to a list of users with a bunch of stories they like, you can also rate the user so new stories can also be based, to some extent, on the reading behaviour of users you like …even grab a users attention feed (your own attention feeds are at the Tracked tab).
Findory also has an attention feed for your own account, but it doesn’t promote others.
One thing Findory does, is it lets you load in your own OPML…this is attention (reading behaviour) based on your attention sources…very attentive
(this can be seen by the default Top Stories view from within your Favourites OPML)
More
Search box
Add widgets to your website
Stories by date
History
Top Stories (has a feed)
List your favourite topics or sources on the sidebar widget (note: you can move these widgets up/down)
- choose a topic
- then choose a source or two or three, etc…
- choose another topic, etc…
- then create a title, and your done.
This option also reveals the sources for each topic, so now you can see the source lists.
There is a list of categories on the sidebar, I would like to set which categories I want on my homepage, and from these, I’d like to set which topics I’d like to see, then save this as my homepage.
Maybe it doesn’t work like this, just start using it and this will end up happening
…the topics I like are Blogs>Talk, and Computers & Internet>Web2.0.
What I did is firstly removed the Categories I don’t like till I just had Blogs, and Computers & Internet, then within each category if a story came from a topic I didn’t like, I blocked it via the “less” function (or if I liked the topic but not the source, then I blocked the source).
After a while I am left with just the topics I like, and also just the sources from these topics…after all that work why couldn’t I set this from the start or even load in my own OPML.
Then I just read a story and rate it, if a new story doesn’t appear I just ask to see a new story from a topic I like via the “more” function.
The next time I logged in the topics I like were my default setting…kind of a roundabout way to get started.
This is fun reading this way, the more you rate it the better the stories are becoming.
Another approach
This may take longer as you have to do more taming, but may be beneficial in the long run.
Remove the categories you really don’t like, and remove the topics and sources you really don’t like, but leave some topics and source unblocked as they may have the occassional post you’d be interested in.
When you see a post you don’t like from one of these topics or sources, just rate it badly…eventually less stories from these topics or sources will display, and if they do, it will probably be for your benefit.
More
Like I said before, Findory lets you load in your own OPML, imagine making your own topics, from your favourite sources, basically organise your sources in folders.
This would show every item from the sources in your OPML, the top stories view could just show items it thinks you will like, based on your past reading behaviour.
Just like when you view your OPML at Megite or Tailrank (memetrackers), it only shows stories from your sources that are popular (based on inbound links from the blogosphere)
…these services also recommend items from sources outside of your OPML.
I wonder if Findory Favourites (OPML) or Spotback would show recommended items from the reading behaviour within your own OPML.
Recap
Basically, the personalisation is based on clicks, rating, saving, comments…not all stories from the topics or sources you like will be displayed, only the stories based on your reading behaviour.
Findory Favourites is more personalised as it does this for your own OPML (ie. you get to choose the sources), then it will display stories from the Top Stories view…ie. view stories from my OPML based on stories I’ve read in the past from this OPML…or you can read the traditional way, just click on a source and read all stories from a source in your OPML.
Then I want to be recommended stories externally to my OPML, based on the stories I click from within my OPML.
Some other features Findory has for a given source:
- view posts
- related blogs
- related stories (feed, also re-syndicate)
- neighbours (a visual version of related blogs)
- word bursts (this is called Findory Tags)
[ADDED 3/05/06: Not sure if I would use Spotback or Findory as much since I can already have personalised news in Rojo…the relevance view displays stories based on your reading behaviour…the great thing about Rojo is that you get to choose the feed set, and you get to organised the feed set into topics]
[ADDED 3/05/06: Greg Linden’s review]
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