

Getting the News — Evan Williams - ssaraiya
http://blog.news.me/post/18439216464/getting-the-news-evan-williams

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jgrahamc
I'm not worried about the 'old news' problem he talks about, I'm more worried
about the combination of groupthink and algorithms that learn what I read and
serve me the same stuff. One of the joys of newspaper reading is that there's
a lot of stuff in them that I don't want to read (at first), but over time I
get trained to look at topics I wasn't interested in.

When recommenders are applied to news you'll get more of the stuff you like,
but you're losing out because you are not seeing the stuff you didn't know
that you would like.

~~~
papercruncher
Building a model and personalizing a news stream on a per-user basis is
entirely feasible today. Even with very simple ML, you can see some very good
real world results.

To avoid the problem of not being able to surface new topics because the user
model has converged somewhere, you can use a bandit approach(seriously, who
comes up with these names?). By that we mean that you do a bit of exploration
by showing news topics drawn at random from some distribution and then adapt
your model to what you learned. The naive implementation is "Every
random(10,20) news items suggested by the recommender, display 1 drawn at
random from the entire corpus. Adapt_Model(user_clicked)"

More info: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-armed_bandit>

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ward
> I’ll occasionally type in the domains of other blogs, but if I find myself
> doing that, it’s a sign I’m not very focused and should get back to work.

This is so true (for me at least). Especially when you reach that point that
you actually checked some site only an hour or so earlier and _know_ nothing
new of interest with be there.

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cwe
> _iPhone is a biggie, as mentioned above. I don’t touch my iPad much — if so,
> it’s mostly as an expensive Kindle. I still like the laptop/desktop
> experience the most. I wish more content was designed for the big screen._

I can't believe the responsive web design trend hasn't done more to take
advantage of gigantic screens. Everyone is pushing for smaller screens on
mobile devices, while computer screens are way bigger than the 800-1100px
width most sites are built for. Fullscreen apps on OSX are getting people used
to the gigantic screen, but news in a 600px column doesn't really take
advantage.

Pinterest does a good job with this, where they add columns as the browser
gets bigger. Some may find it a little more cluttered, but at least it's using
the space efficiently.

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SkyMarshal
> _One thing that I find missing is discovery of non-new content. The web is
> completely oriented around new-thing-on-top. Our brains are also wired to
> get a rush from novelty. But most “news” we read really doesn’t matter. And
> a much smaller percentage of the information I actually care about or would
> find useful was produced in the last few hours than my reading patterns
> reflect._

Nassim Taleb wrote about this too in _Fooled By Randomness_ , worth a read:

[http://www.curatedalpha.com/2011/nassim-taleb-minimal-
exposu...](http://www.curatedalpha.com/2011/nassim-taleb-minimal-exposure-to-
the-media-as-a-guiding-principle/)

