Outbrain : Cross RSS Reader recommendations
Just signed up to Outbrain, yet to use it, it seems to be a personalisation service based on rating/voting…it doesn’t seem to be an RSS Reader, but more an add-on to your RSS Reader.
From the developer:
“We do this by asking all outbrain users to vote on the items they read. The algorithm then seeks out similarities in voting patterns among different outbrainers, and personalizes recommendations accordingly. The more people vote about stuff they read, the smarter their outbrain becomes in recommending the right items to them.”
More:
“The idea is simple - If every blog/post/feed is read by many people, why don’t we harness the collective wisdom of all the readers for everyone’s benefit? That way we can save each reader’s time by quickly floating the best posts and flagging the worst.”
Their first feature is recommendation: to serve you highly relevant posts based on your voting and others with similar voting…so this seems similar to UltraGleeper, in recommending you stuff not in your feed set.
Others are Findory, Spotback, TailRank, Megite, WizAg, feeds.reddit, Feeds2.0, MyFeedz, etc…
They say their next feature is on filtering: basically the opposite of recommendation.
A future feature would be to cluster similar stories, WizAg, MyFeedz, and Feeds2.0 are ahead in this game.
If you use an RSS Reader with a voting personalisation feature which there are now many, I’m not sure how Outbrain would help. If I use Rojo, part of the personalisation is based on my personal voting and community voting, so how would Outbrain help, considering Rojo is on their support list…perhaps the idea is that personalisation is based on popularity voting on a community that is larger than Rojo. Perhaps we can get socially popular news (based on voting) from various communities…eg. personalisation based on the Rojo, Bloglines, Newsgator, etc…communities.
Kind of like Technorati can return search results from the blogopshere based on popularity (based on incoming links), we could read stories in our RSS Reader based on popularity from the RSS Readersphere (based on voting, and other measures).
As far as I know, Bloglines is the only reader from the three above that doesn’t have a rating/voting feature, so this would be handy to get personalised content and recommended content for Bloglines users. And likewise Rojo who sign up to Outbrain can get recommended posts from the reading behaviour of Newsgator and Bloglines users.
An easier way would be for these RSS Readers to share their data, and get someone to manage it so you can be recommended stuff from across several RSS Readers, but instead Outbrain seem to get people to sign up and collect the data themselves, then share it to all.
Even better is the APML movement, filtered/recommended content according to your APML file, and imagine if you could add APML files of your friends as well.
Related:
Rojo: functionality and attention data
RSS Reading: recommendations
![email.png](http://services.nexodyne.com/email/icon/GxbiQvgbwBgCnw%3D%3D/oIp%2BJMQ%3D/R01haWw%3D/0/image.png"){kind=icon}
