
I feel blog discovery needs improvements, any ideas? - diabloernest
http://www.jatspeak.com/blog/?p=13
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simpleenigma
This is the point where great content recommendation comes into play. Read the
information about the NetFlix prize that has been on the front page or just go
over to <http://netflixprize.com> for more info.

This is one of the aspects I've been looking into using Content Recommendation
for, but I'm looking at it from a larger information overload perspective.

Even a site like Digg can only really do popularity because of the binary
nature of the thumbs up/thumbs down system, but once you move past the binary
scale into a 5 star rating system and take your algorithms from a slope one
into a latent semantic indexing, or something similar, instead of popularity
you end up with personalization.

Of course this all depends on the quality of the data and the size of you user
base, plus the cross section of the users that have voted on similar items, in
this case blogs.

I'm personally taking the bet that this approach is one of the next great ways
to organize information and is worth the next few years of my life to work on
.

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diabloernest
Nice thoughts! We share a common goal! :)

I am trying to solve the problem of blog consumption. Blog consumption, by
nature is personalized. You have your own set of feeds that you read daily. I
have a different set. Which means that whatever feed/post appeals you, might
not suit my taste, and vice versa. Thus, community rating like digg etc, is
not the right way to treat your blog posts, or in other words, you should not
draw your recommendations "completely" from such a system. That's why i intend
to build a personalized system, (may be plugged in your favourite reader) for
this!.

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diabloernest
Current blog discovery mechanisms like technorati and google search are not
much helpful in that. Consuming blog feeds has more to do with
personalization. Keyword based search is a bit callow for this. ideas use case
should be when u r reading a blog entry, your reader should throw
recommendations for it. I am planning to build this infrastructure. Any
suggestions/critics for this?

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tuukkah
You could implement the recommendation backend so that it can be accessed from
feed readers, server-side frameworks, client-side widgets, and browser
extensions. This way you can also gather data from all these sources to base
the recommendations on. Perhaps there's a revenue-sharing scheme to motivate
third parties.

I guess finding similar blogs would take more long-term data whereas finding
similar posts should react very quickly. I'm specifically thinking of the case
where two blog posts are both linked to by a third post: those two could then
be considered similar. Comparing the frequency of some key words mentioned in
the posts would be another way to get started, as would be looking at the
audiences.

Whatever the method, it should provide results that users find meaningful in
meeting the need they have.

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diabloernest
Good suggestions! Have been thinking on the same lines myself. Have a system
design ready, and will post it in 2 days to get it reviewed. cya then :).

