One of the most important aspects of the Web 2.0 movement is personalization. The idea is that different people are interested in different stuff - the challenge is to give each single individual the personally most relevant experience of the web.
Most services approach this problem in a very similar manner: They keep track of what an individual user seems to be most interested in (aka pays attention to…) when it comes to news stories or blog posts and use learning algorithms to provide each user with stuff that matches her particular taste.
This is a “bottom-up” approach - the algorithm is analyzing attention data and tries to detect patterns within an user’s reading habits.
I tried Findory for a while, and even though I think that their algorithms work reasonably fine in detecting those patterns, I gave up using it fairly quickly.
What I haven’t given up is Bloglines, where I explicitly specify which blogs and RSS feeds I read - this is as “Top-Down” as it gets.

Yet, it would be nice to have a personalization service that combines both approaches, top-down and bottom-up. I am not simply referring to a service which would give me a Bloglines-style RSS reader combined with some Findory-style pattern recognition newsbot.

A good personalization service would give me additional options to affect and control the newsbot by, for instance, letting me specify keywords that describe what I am currently most interested in. Besides the bottum-up pattern recognition, it should take those top-down keywords into account when filtering the web for me.

A perfect personalization service would include a third approach, namely a component showing me what my friends and other trusted sources find interesting: let’s call this the “horizontal” approach.

We are working on such a feature for Outfoxed and this HotList is already pointing me to a lot of interesting stuff. Basically, this is digg as personal as it gets.
At some point, it would be interesting to have the possibility to include this into one’s news personalization service of choice.

technorati tags: personalization,

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