Beyond RSS
RSS is great, mostly if you are a software. It is a protocol that allows software to check for updates on information source and highlight the new updates. It is so great that in fact its already changed the way that many of us consuming information. I, for example, do not visits sites anymore for news reading- if you don’t have RSS you do not exist.
But the problem is that with the ease of consuming information came a flood of it and we just don’t have enough time to sort, filter and then read the information we really interested in. Most RSS readers, or aggregators just deal with the technical level of allowing the user to subscribe to RSS feed and get updates in somewhat comfortable way.
Other sites try to harness the “wisdom of the crowed” assuming that the most clicked, or linked, post should get the most attention. It is a problematic approach, and I wrote about it in the past. In short the rating approach doesn’t provide my specific interests.
The answer is a process that will be able to analyze specific interests and priorities and provide personalized “newspapers” tailored to specific readers. Such service will take the real advantage of RSS and harness it into sophisticated information service.
Outbrain is an attempt in creating personalized news service. Although Outbrain is in the very first stages the direction is right:
So we decided to try and take this one step beyond the collective ‘ wisdom of crowds’ type sites (aka - Digg & clones, or should we say ‘ wisdom of bored teenager sites’…), and develop algorithms that try to predict personal interest in a specific article/post before it is read.
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.
If you are interested in this subject you can join the project and provide valuable information to improve the matching algorithm.
Technorati Tags: blogosphare - Google News - Newspapers - Newsvine - New Media - Old Media - tech.meme - outbrain - RSS
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Ingrid
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Their are many service that will give you now the most clicked, or highest rating, post. Technorati doing good job in this respect.
The challenge that outbrain took is to build for you personalized newspaper that will be tailored to your own taste and interest. They also trying to do so without drugging you into their site but in your "natural" environment - the one you are using now.
In a way they are trying to take RSS to were it belongs - back stage, and bring the news to the front.
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Ingrid - As Rogel pointed out, we're trying to help readers find the most *personally* interesting items in the most non-obtrusive way. We try to do that in the environment you are already used to using. Whether it's your RSS reader, or just blogs you happen to read regularly.
Outbrain is definitely NOT a replacement for your favorite blogs. We all have a bunch of favorite blogs we continue reading as usual. This is more of a discovery/sorting/filtering technology for the 99.99% other blogs that you can't track manually but would still want to find the best nuggets in them.
If you have any other questions, shoot me an email at: galai (at) outbrain (dot) com
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Digg, and some of the social sites are bad because they use "collective wisdom" to elevate the importance of a story and that's bad.
Your program is good because people can vote up relevant stories.
How is what you're doing with this any different from what digg et.al. are doing? It seems to be the same to me except your users are "meta-moderating" the moderated content from other providers (to borrow a slashdot phrase).
Am I just not getting it? Is there something to it that I'm just not picking up on?
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First Outbrain isn't my program. I'm only a fun and an alpha user.
Second: the different between Tech.Meme, Google news, etc. and outbrain is that outbrain tries to much news for your personal interest. The ranking done so it can "learn" what you are interested in and much it too what other, with similar interests, liked.
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If a lot of users use linkedfeed to rate feeds and news items, it can provide recommended feeds and items.
Though I am looking forward to Outbrain!
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well that rules me out, i'm a human being, not a "software".
Thanks anyway.
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Being human doesn't rule you out, quiet the contrary.
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