Olympic Medal Count Map
I know its old, but its so so gorgeous.
NYTimes at its finest.
Google Reader and its Recommendation Engine
Isn’t very good, frankly.
Rather than offering entire feeds - it needs to offer stories that appeal to the user.
If I’m given a recommended feed “I may like” I’ll probably add it to my reader and never look at it — partly because I have over 1000 feeds — however, I do want stories that appeal to me. I’m not going to filter through my RSS feeds - my reader should.
The future of RSS readers is detaching RSS feeds and stories — it’s time we stopped overloading our readers and started creating news tailored to our readers.
It should know what I want. If it doesn’t, its broken.
Why aren’t there any decent news recommendation engines?
For what its worth I don’t mean social news sharing sites like Digg and Reddit. They rock.
I mean services where users should go every day for their actual news. The web2.0 of BBC News. Where your average joe will go instead of reading the newspaper.
I remember reading this article and thinking “cool, but not good enough”. Two years on - where are we?
Reddit
Well, reddit was acquired - which is cool, but I can’t say their news recommendation has improved at all. I don’t think its even changed… Lots of new features in other parts of the site, so apparently recommended news isn’t a popular feature
Spotback is no longer a news service at all. Nifty.
SearchFox hasn’t been updated since 2005.
I loved Findory, lets just remember that for a second. Ahhh.
Feeds 2.0 (that name won’t age well!) still works an is a clunky beta. I’ve been watching it and havent noticed any changes in at least six months.
Leaptag is being gradually updated, but I still believe that they’re on the wrong approach. Users don’t want to have to trawl through news initially.
So whats hot in this sector?
Google News
Google has been rapidly adding social and recommendation features to Google News. It still isn’t obvious to me how you specify what news you want.
I really hope it doesn’t simply watch you from the corner and change your feed based on your reading habits. Creepy.
Newsvine
Newsvine is probably the daddy of social news. You can easily watch users submit their own news, and view news by tag.
The tagging is rather inaccurate, and I still can’t make it never ever show me Sarah Palin news. Infuriating.
Conclusion
The news arena is huge - probably one of the webs biggest. Why aren’t there hundreds of Google News competitors? This area really seems in a sorry affair.
Am I the only one that is infuriated that there aren’t services where I can simply say “show me all economics news unless it contains “FTSE100” and never show me technology news”?
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