information overload

[gusl]

Does anyone know any better ways to optimally receive your feed from the blogging world?

Here are my desired features:

* collaborative filtering: give a high score that were rated highly by people similar to me.
* keyword filtering: show articles that match my keywords e.g. if there's something on the news about my hometown.
* category filtering: besides keywords, the system should know what kind of topic I am interested in. (this is low-priority for me). Given the collaborative nature of this, these categories could get highly specialized in some communities.
* provide exactly as many new articles as I feel like reading (LJ friends list is awkward for this).
* it should know which articles I've read before and give slight priority to recent articles.

Collaborative filtering is yet another case of a technology that's been around, but not implemented (or at least, not applied as widely as it should be). This is an opportunity, people!

I've been waiting for micropayments to come around and change this general situation... but will it ever come? It's had plenty of time...

Comments

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

I feel the same way about wanting some kind of collaborative filtering technology to mature, and wondering why it hasn't.

I think part of the problem is that you can't necessarily just up and write a tool that essentially requires a lot of people using it all at once to be useful --- you have to convince people to "join" as well. And the more people become accustomed to having a lot of different nice features in one social-software-system, say livejournal, they may be reluctant to add another community to the list of those they've joined (I know I've had little patience for orkut and friendster in the long run, because they're like lj without everything that makes lj useful and interesting) or, even more so, reluctant to give up their preferred system for another.

RSS goes some of the way toward making the idea of aggregation nice and modular, and I hear there are some good clients out there (though I haven't tried any) but the main thing that prevents me from reading all my news that way is, I think, the fact that I don't just want to read news, I want to comment on other people's posts in a uniform way.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

re: the barrier of entry for new communities

I wish systems were open. Systems like Orkut, where you have to log in, make it difficult for one to export your "friends lists" / etc to new services. Whenever you sign up for a new service, you have to do everything again...

So we need a standard for putting all the data on one's own website, and have the services interface with it. I credit solvedating.com with this idea.


the main thing that prevents me from reading all my news that way is, I think, the fact that I don't just want to read news, I want to comment on other people's posts in a uniform way.

don't RSS readers allow you to post comments?

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

don't RSS readers allow you to post comments?

Oh, do they? Maybe I am underinformed.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

I think you made a wrong presupposition here. I've never used one, but I thought they should, since that seems like a basic feature.

Micropayments

[r6.livejournal.com]

Micropayments won’t work (http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/19/micropayments.html).

Re: Micropayments

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

Interesting. I had a boss who said he would rather lose 5 minutes working through Google results than spend 1 cent for a piece of information... yet his time was worth a lot more than 12c/hour.

What's puzzling, though, is that people don't mind making micropayments when they use the telephone. I wonder if a change in the HCI could save micropayments... perhaps a system that warns you when things get too expensive or when you've been spending too much (a feature which phone plans don't have, AFAIK), or maybe a hierarchy of accreditation agencies.

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

* collaborative filtering: give a high score that were rated highly by people similar to me.

This is a really good idea. I've been thinking lately how there are probably a lot of journals on here that I'd like to read, but I just don't know what they are. If we had a rating system, it might work a lot better. In order to filter out the problem of the "politeness factor" whereupon someone might rate everyone on their friends list high simply because they don't want to offend, you'd need some kind of anonymity too. But I think the best way to do it might be based on interest. For instance, you could select a single interest, such as transhumanism, and look at how a particular journal was ranked by people interested in transhumanism. Without actually being able to find out which people in particular gave which ratings. Or, better yet, it could do more like what you were suggesting and do a best-fit match to your interests. Probably a combination of both would be good. sigh. I'm still pissed off that they took away the matching of users based on interests, that's how I found a lot of journals in the first place, but now it's no longer an option at all.

[kvschwartz.livejournal.com]

happy birthday